Chionodoxa is the bulb almost nobody asks for by name. It opens in March at about ten centimetres, a loose spray of upward facing stars in blue or white or pink, and it does two things at once that very few bulbs manage, setting seed freely and thickening at the root, so a handful planted this autumn becomes a carpet inside four or five years. Our own catalogue called it inimitable. It was not overselling.
When Does Chionodoxa Flower
March, and it opens while the grass around it is still short. That is the whole trick of the plant, because a bulb that has finished before the lawn needs cutting can go into thin turf without committing you to six weeks of shaggy grass afterwards, which is the thing that stops most people putting bulbs in a lawn at all. Ten centimetres tall. Forbesii Blue Giant is nearer fifteen.
Why Is It Called Glory Of The Snow
Because it is a literal translation. Chion is Greek for snow and doxa for glory, and in the mountains of western Turkey where they come from these open at the edge of the melting snowline, which is as good a description of a plant as any name has ever managed. In a Bedfordshire border there is rarely snow to glory in. There is bare brown soil, and the effect is the same.
Is Chionodoxa Now A Scilla
The botanists say yes and the label often says both. Chionodoxa has been folded into scilla, so what we and everyone else have always called chionodoxa forbesii is now, strictly speaking, scilla forbesii, and you will find it offered either way without anyone being wrong. We have kept the old name. It is the one gardeners use.
How Do You Tell Luciliae From Forbesii
Count the flowers on one stem. Luciliae carries two or three, each of them large, up to about three and a half centimetres across and violet blue with a clean white eye, while forbesii sends up a spike of anything from four to ten smaller flowers in a deeper blue and stands taller with it. The two names have been swapped about in the trade for a century. The stems settle it.
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How Do You Plant Chionodoxa
Five centimetres deep, five apart, and in numbers. This is not a bulb to buy ten of, because the whole effect depends on mass and a scatter of ten reads as an accident, where fifty in a drift under a shrub or through thin grass reads as something that has been there for years. Autumn planting, any time from September. It wants nothing else from you.
Will Chionodoxa Take Over The Garden
It might. Chionodoxa is one of the few small bulbs that spreads two ways at the same time, setting seed all round itself and splitting at the root as well, so in ground it takes to you will find it coming up in gravel, in paving joints and in the middle of things you never planted it anywhere near. None of that is hard to undo. The bulbs sit shallow enough that a hand fork lifts a clump you have gone off in about a minute.
Which Chionodoxa Should You Choose
Blue first, then decide whether you want anything else. Luciliae is the gentian blue one with the almost white centre and holds an Award of Garden Merit, forbesii is a softer Cambridge blue with a large white eye, and forbesii Blue Giant is the deepest of the three and opens a little after the others, which is worth having if you want the season to run on.
The rest is a proper spread of colour. Alba is pure white, Rose Queen a violet rose against dark foliage, Violet Beauty a showy violet blue, and Pink Giant the strongest pink of the lot on upright stems. Luciliae Assorted is the mixture, and it is the drift in the photograph at the top of this page. For naturalising in quantity it is the one we would plant.
What To Plant With Chionodoxa
Underneath something, rather than beside it. The most useful thing chionodoxa does is go in by the hundred under a group of tulips or daffodils, where it costs a fraction of what they do and makes them look twice as good, filling the bare ground between the stems with a blue haze at exactly the moment the taller bulbs are all leaf and no flower. That is the trick worth stealing. It works under shrubs too.
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