The crocus is the most exciting flower because they are the first.
Winter is still lashing furiously about when the earliest of them—gold, purple, and white—spangle the lawn, carpet the loam under shrubs, push up through streaks of left-over snow and freeze into flowers of sheer ice when sleet storms rage.
Yes, crocus are necessary whether you have a small plot or an acre!
Indian Summer Day
One Indian summer day, I was happily digging them under our lawn when, strangely enough, the spirit of Christmas came blowing down the street in the chill wind.
The falling leaves rustled along the sidewalk Christmas was in the swirls of blue smoke soaring to high heaven, combing up the gold maples, the rusty copper oaks, and the shimmering yellow tulip trees.
Yes, the last of autumn was burning and dying now, making way for the Christmas season ahead
Autumn Evenings
It was then that an idea was born—and our autumn evenings the next few weeks became fraught with adventure.
I found myself kneeling on the rapidly chilling October earth outside my neighbor’s house while he, unaware of my presence, read the evening paper 5’ feet off inside his living room window.
A corrugated box of crocus corms was beside me. My son was handing me the corms in the dark.
My husband was nervously lighting his pipe. “Look, what’ll you say if someone hears you and comes to the door?” he whispered uneasily.
“Oh, just that I came over to borrow some salt !” I tossed back the first thing that came into my head.
“On headed knee to ask?” he queried.
He seemed not too happy. He doesn’t like to trespass. But he handed me a couple of croci all the same.
Planting Crocus: Christmas Present
Crocus would be our Christmas present to our friends and neighbors, announced by a card—”with the first warm days of spring, fling wide your door, and our present will be there!”
This crocus planting gathered momentum through the late autumn, and we kept buying more and more.
Even my non-trespassing husband succumbed and participated. We planted anywhere from one dozen to several around the houses of our friends, relatives, and neighbors.
Planting Crocus As Trademark
As a sort of trademark, we always planted one small group of 5 at the left of each front door.
As we were planting our way down a street one night, why pass a house simply because we didn’t know the owners? We wondered, so we began putting crocus in whether we knew the people or not.
This was a whole new angle—with new complications. Bob Junior, nestling some crocus beside the steps of a strange house, struck an underground wire, and a burglar alarm shattered the peaceful night.
A Lot Of Crocus Underground
Dropping everything, he fled. Occasionally an inhabitant would emerge from his door unexpectedly, and we would shrink breathless into bushes.
But all together, we got quiet. There is a lot of crocus underground, and I never had to ask for salt!
Would the police arrest us as we put bulbs beside the late Ex-Mayor La Guardia’s front door?
What would the Passionist Fathers think next spring when a profusion of blue and gold crocus ran riot over the somber lawns of their monastery?
Or the nuns beyond the narrow gate in the high stone wall where we also planted a group?
How about the old station master, who does embroidery between trains?
We planted some in the gravelly earth under his window.
And then we stopped up the road by the orphan asylum, and why not a few by the Fire House, and here by the bus stop for people waiting in the March winds?
Crocuses For Ugly Little Houses
And surely those ugly little houses on the hack street needed crocuses.
That year, spring fell gently down out of heaven in a warming sun to quicken the land below.
And all along the familiar streets in our neighborhood, spring rose out of the earth in myriads of multicolored flowers.
It was then we wondered who the giver was and who the receiver was in all this.
44659 by Jean Hersey