Grape Hyacinth

What’s blooming in the area: Apple, rosy purple flowered shrubs, iris, hoary cress, purple, tumble and tansy mustard, stickseed, golden smoke, oxalis, flax, blue gilia, perky Sue, native and common dandelion, June, cheat and three awn grass; grapes and Virginia creeper leafing; Russian thistle and pigweed coming up.

What’s blooming in my yard: Lilac, forsythia, spirea, Siberian pea, tulips, last daffodils, grape hyacinth, baby blue iris, vinca, mossy phlox, coral bells, first small-leaved soapwort, yellow alyssum, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on snowball, cheddar pink, sea pink, and Jupiter’s beard; catalpa, black locust, and Rose of Sharon leafing out; purple coneflower and purple ice plant coming up; piñon transplanted in 2006 now knee-high.

Inside: South African aptenia, kalanchoë and zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, birds, gecko, red and black ants, flying grasshoppers, first stinkbug, bumblebee on Siberian pea, hummingbird bird moth on Persian lilac.

Weather: Temperatures remained above freezing all week; rain and wind yesterday; 14:31 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Infrastructure is more than dams, ditches and roads. The expansion of gardens and gardening in the nineteenth century depended as much on complex social networks as it did on faster rail and steamship transportation.

Maximilian Leichtlin, the man who introduced the grape hyacinths now blooming to the west of the house, was born in 1831 in an area where local aristocrats’ gardens had trained a cadre of local workers. The Margrave of Baden-Durlach, Karl Wilhelm, had moved his capital to Karlsruhe in 1715, then planted a lustgarten supplied with plants by Christian Thran whom he sent collecting in Algeria and Tunisia.

Karl Wilhelm’s grandson, Karl Friedrich, redesigned the gardens around 1800 and sold off the original orangery and greenhouses, no doubt to courtiers who had multiplied when he was made Grade Duke of Baden. During Leichtlin’s childhood the gardens were neglected by succeeding dukes, but were revived by Friedrich I in the 1850's. Soon after Leichtlin moved to Ghent, where he worked for Louis von Houtte’s nursery for 17 years.

Leichtlin returned to the Karlsruhe region in 1871 where he established a private garden near Baden, which had developed into a luxury spa and casino. His primary interest was bulbs, including gladiola and crocosima from southern Africa, hostas from Japan, and even a form of mariposa lily from the Sierra Nevada. Like any modern Wall Street tyro, he used the contacts and knowledge he had developed when he worked for someone else.

As soon as he knew something about a plant, he exploited the networks that were developing commercial markets by sending bulbs to important gardeners, nurseries and publishers. In 1878, Baker described his Muscari armeniacum in The Garden Chronicle in England. In 1892 Leichtlin began writing his own "Notes from Baden-Baden" for Americans reading Garden and Forest.

His rival, George Gaw, used political contacts to study the crocus. He asked British consuls in Trebizond and Erzerum in the 1880's to send him bulbs. He passed the ones he didn’t need to friends like J. E. Elwes, who in turn sent the most promising to Barr’s Nursery. They introduced a light blue flower as Muscari conicum. When the Dutch publicized a different plant with the same name, Barr renamed its Heavenly Blue.

Until international groups were organized to agree upon nomenclature, gardeners weren’t able to order bulbs, seeds or roots with the trust that has proven necessary to the spread of trade. In 1926, Kew Gardens’ Botanical Magazine determined Elwes’ plant was the same as the darker one grown by Leichtlin. Louise Beebe Wilder believed the pictures of Muscari armericum she saw in van Tubergen’s catalog looked like Heavenly Blue, but when they grew they were stronger, taller, and a "rich blue-violet in color, the teeth white but not very conspicuous."

Catalogs can still be misleading. Last fall I needed to replenish my grape hyacinths and innocently ordered Blue Spike because the suppler’s picture showed a dark blue flower. The color in my soil is much greyer. The fatter heads are both more visible and, unlike the photograph, harder for my eye to blend into a pattern.

Taxonomic agreement is still missing. Some retailers describe Blue Spike as a hybrid. One calls it a mutation, and many simply say it’s a cultivar. A few mention the flowers are sterile and won’t reproduce like the species. Unfortunately, the catalog I read wasn’t one.

I planted my first grape hyacinths in 1997. The next year there were far fewer plants, but those that survived were beginning to naturalize from bulb offsets when they were nibbled in the dry spring of 2000. The rabbit or ground squirrel ate more in 2003 and I replenished them in the fall. Again I lost a number the first year, but was seeing those best adapted to New Mexico start to come back when a gopher burrowed in the area in 2007.

Wilder loved her Heavenly Blue, but warned readers to "keep it out of the rock garden" because the seeds and bulblets make it "almost impossible to eradicate." Here, nature keeps it in check. I should have ordered the species because the qualities that make it aggressive elsewhere are the very ones I need for it to come back in after the initial die off. The quality of the modern marketing infrastructure is so high, I forget caveat emptor.

Notes:
Schmidt nursery's website has the most information on the life of Maximilian Leichtlin.

Wilder, Louise Beebe. Adventures with Hardy Bulbs, 1936, reprinted in 1990 by Collier’s American Gardening Classics series; her source for the story about Gaw is the 1926 Botanical Magazine article that redefined Heavenly Blue.

Photograph: Blue Spike grape hyacinth with smaller species grown from bulblet or seed in rear, 25 April 2009.