Thursday, April 23, 2009

Exponential Exuberance

A Story about Some Daffodils
I returned here to WillOaks Farm in the Summer of 2003 after many, many years away. That Autumn, I decided to make up some pots of Spring bulbs to force into early bloom inside, a favorite treat in the dead of Winter. And they were glorious in bloom--hyacinths in threes and daffodils in clusters in a couple of large pots that burst into bloom sometime in February.

But I hate to kill a plant, it's part of the reason the house here is a bit overrun with them and part of the reason I give the largest ones away to loving homes on a regular basis. So conventional wisdom is that once a Spring bulb has been forced, it is either discarded or put into the garden to recover, in a year or two, to resume its' life "in nature." So in the Fall of 2004, I planted out these now dormant, but formerly forced, daffodils & hyacinths (they had matured while still living in their flower pots), the hyacinths in one of the gardens, and the daffs in a row along the edge of a vegetable patch.


They didn't do too much come Spring of 2005, started to look like blooming daffs again in Spring of 2006, and have been demonstrating "exponential exuberance" each Spring ever since. If I have time, I may dig and divide them later this summer. With color like this--I can imagine them clustered in other places around the farm. What a great demonstration of exponents where 1=2=4=8=16, etc.

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