Just not ready to plant bulbs

Once again, I was out in the garden today and couldn't bring myself to plant any bulbs. I have them -- have a list of them (more than 600) by species, cultivar and bloom time -- have a plan in writing for where each blessed one is to go in the garden -- all in writing. Have every bulb-planting tool known to man, of which all I ever use are a trowel and a shovel. But I just couldn't do it.

It didn't feel like time yet. The air was not crisp and bracing. Most of the leaves haven't begun to turn, apart from the stray 'Autumn Blaze' maple or gingko here and there. Despite day after day of drizzly rain and night after night deep into the 40s, there are brave little pink flower buds on the pot of impatiens on the patio table. The coleus has shriveled up and died, but the elephant ears, the geraniums on the stoop and many of the other annuals I've been waiting for frost to kill are hanging tough. The turtlehead and toad lilies are still blooming their hearts out, along with the goldenrod, Russian sage and lobelia out back in the sun. In my beds, everything gets packed tightly, and I cannot bring myself to cut down and clear away blooming perennials to make room to dig holes for bulbs.

I needed something to do to keep me out in the sun and fresh air today, so I got out the pole pruner and whacked back as much suckering growth as I could reach from the gnarly old mulberry over the patio and and the weedy Norway maple that keeps trying to make my part-shade bed into full shade. There was not a sign of leaf color on any of the branches that I brought tumbling down.

To plant bulbs, I need some physical cues, the way a poinsettia responds to day length and a crocus sprout responds to soil temperature. I need a frost to kill the impatiens and make them yucky melted green stems instead of brave little flower buds. I need colorful leaves cascading from the maples and the hackberry and the elms and the oak. I need to need to do some raking before I can tuck scilla bulbs into the lawn. I need a chill in the air that requires a turtleneck and a layer or two. I need to be able to ruthlessly yank out annuals that have died and hack away perennials that have gone dormant. It helps if there's a whiff of smoke in the air late in the afternoon from the neighbors' first wood fire.

I was pruning in a T-shirt this afternoon. T-shirt weather is not bulb-planting weather. It just won't do.

Now, I realize I am taking a risk. Warm as it may be (some days), the later it gets in October, the greater the risk of a sudden Arctic cold front that freezes the soil and leaves me with a lot of bulbs on my hands. Like that year (was it last year? the year before last?) when we got nearly a foot of snow the first week in December and me with hardly a bulb planted. I seized on one of those January warm spells (Chicago weather is nothing if not various) to scrape away mulch and shove bulbs into the chilly muck. A few of them bloomed.

Even if we don't get slammed, unless I get the bulbs in the ground soon they won't have many weeks to work on their root systems before the ground freezes up sometime during Advent. Every day they are out of the ground they risk drying out or getting moldy. And if I don't get them planted at all, they won't get the 14 weeks of winter chill they need to know to bloom next spring.

But I feel like I am caught in a gardener purgatory. All of the summer tasks are finished; all of the preparation-for-fall tasks are finished. I'm ready. I want it to be time for fall tasks -- collecting and shredding leaves and stashing them away, tucking up the dormant elephant ear tubers, planting the Narcissus 'Bridal Crown' and 'Tete a Tete' and 'Mount Hood' and the Allium ostrowskianum and Chionodoxa and the 'Elegant Lady' lily-flowered tulips. Can't I have a freeze please?


Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

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