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Dirt on the Keys

A plant geek sweats over, swears at, and celebrates in his own gardens
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Clumps of camassia, blooming their blue heads off on a rainy April Monday at Fort Tryon Park, the far North of Manhattan.
That's the Hudson and Jersey in the background; it's a spectactular site.
"Big" is a relative thing, but read on. There are only a few blue-blooming Spring bulbs—scilla, muscari, crocuses, hyacinths, and these early-early Iris reticulata, which, yes, grow from bulbs.
Hyacinths aren't worth it past the first Spring anyway, so let's toss them as being what they truly are, a splurge for municipal garden bedding.
In cost-conscious gardens, then, all the other Spring blues are ankle-biters: Four inches, six inches, tops. Except camassia. Shin-high, it's the giant among them. And it's staying power is unrivaled. When it likes you, or rather the land you have to offer it, it can self-seed to the horizon.

Here's a meadow-full in Idaho. How happy are we. (Read more, and see the picture even bigger, here @ Wikipedia.) Other species of camassia are even bigger blue, and can tickle your knees. Most important for me with my flatter-than-Holland land, they are exceptional in their easy-going approach to wet ground, even growing pond-side. That's my garden after Winter rains. Camassia are in my future.



My streetside bed of beauty-berry interplanted with Spring bulbs is at its Spring peak.
But silly me, I still hadn't cut the beautyberry down to the ground. The beauty of the white dafs was "static'd" by the endless but thin branches from the interplanted callicarpa.
They get cut own to only an inch or two. Really low: the clump in the center is now dwarfed not just by the daffodils at the upper right the right, but by the clump of muscari to the upper left.
Now all the bulbs are free of callicarpa "static": They're the Spring show, loud and clear.
Even from the other side of the street.