Muscari

Muscari are a rather nondescript kind of spring bulb that, according to my husband, proliferate.  He was occasionally asked to root them up.  Our muscari were planted in our front beds last year.  As is often the case, they were passed on to us.  It seems that someone gave our friend the gift of a box with a shiny silvery bowl, a small plastic bag of compost and several muscari bulbs.  I explained to her that it was the wrong time of year (some time after Christmas) to plant them and that they were unlikely to flower indoors.  But I took them off her hands.  

I popped them in, out of season, last year and they produced leaves in late spring/early summer.  This year I am gratified to see that they are flowering at the right time.  Somehow the botanical clock inside these bulbs, connected to daylight hours and warmth, has reset itself and prompted them to produce cones of little blue flowers.  

Meanwhile, my husband is out in the front shrubbery preparing for some Forsythia we have been promised.  Again, not the most suitable time of year to dig these shrubs out from a friend's around the corner and translocate them.  But this is what we do.