Simple bulbs can transform a town

Seeds are nice.

But bulbs are better.

I’ve never been much of a gardener. That is my wife’s realm.

She’s the biologist. She’s also a Master Gardener.

So I mostly try to keep my mouth shut and dig holes when necessary.

But bulbs are different.

Planting bulbs for perennials like daffodils or tulips or narcissus can pay dividends for year after year. A couple of good days getting your hands dirty in early November can pay off with weeks of blooms for years to come. And if you focus on bulbs for a few years in a row, the outcome can be spectacular.

At one point, I thought bulbs could transform the community I live in.

It was probably in the early 1980s when I was bitten by the bulb bug, and when I asked around for advice I learned I wasn’t alone.

Dwight Young — the retired chairman of the board of Jay Garment Company — was also a bulb enthusiast. He’d bought a tool that was supposed to make planting them easier, though I preferred to use a trowel or a shovel.

And we got to talking about how bulbs might change the local landscape.

Everyone has heard of Holland, Michigan, and its immense display of tulips each spring.

What if, Dwight and I wondered, we could do something similar in Jay County? A group from Ludington, Michigan, had done a presentation on how they were beautifying their community with flowers.

Dwight and I thought daffodil bulbs were the way to go. Somehow — probably through Dwight’s influence — we were able to convince Portland Rotary Club to cough up some money to buy bulbs for a beautification project.

The first year, because the group met at the Portland Country Club, we started on the club grounds, planting maybe a couple hundred daffodil bulbs where we thought they might have some impact.

They did, and they didn’t.

The trouble with bulbs is that there’s such a long time lag between when they are planted and when they bloom. Take into account the fact that squirrels may dig some of them up for lunch and that some might have been planted upside down, and the results can be underwhelming the first time around. (In other words, they don’t look as spectacular as they did in the catalog when you placed your order.)

Still, the club did it again, this time in Weiler-Wilson Park, and a third time along Votaw Street in Haynes Park.

It was that last one that finally seemed to show the promise of what might happen.

The daffodils bloomed yellow for all to see.

For awhile.

One of the things about perennials is that after the flower blooms, you have to let the rest of the plant remain for awhile as it builds strength and completes its cycle, getting ready for the next year.

And that complicates mowing.

As I recall, the daffodils were still blooming when the city’s park mowers went to work. The scene was either tidied up or devastated, depending upon one’s point of view.

I still remember, with some embarrassment, an expletive-loaded phone conversation with the park superintendent at the time. One afternoon’s mowing had effectively wiped an entire beautification project off the map.

Fortunately, the Rotarians didn’t give up. The club switched to flowering crab trees, giving them to fourth graders with instructions on how to plant them. With John Goodrich’s leadership and generosity, that annual project continues today.

But I will always wonder.

I will always wonder what might happen if a town like Dunkirk or Redkey or Pennville or Portland or Fort Recovery made a serious, longterm commitment to planting perennial bulbs and did so in a thoughtful, well-planned manner over a decade or two.

If you want to know the answer to my musing, ask Holland, Michigan.