Chrysanthemum Concepts

Fall is in full swing, meaning that beautiful Chrysanthemums are showing up not only at the nurseries, but at the grocery stores, drug stores, and lots of other places. It was easy to find a picture, also. I just swang through the local Home Depot parking lot. I didn’t even have to get out of the truck to take the picture.

Other than when they are rooted cuttings, these plants rarely see the inside of a greenhouse. They are usually field grown. The wholesale growers usually order rooted cuttings from the breeders. These cuttings come into the grower some time around the first part of June. When the cuttings reach the grower they have already been treated with a growth retardant that will keep them compact and branching. The wholesale grower will pinch the tip and plant one or more cuttings to a pot—according to the size of the pot. I have seen acres of these pots sitting on a black landscape fabric and irrigated with a drip system that keeps excess water off of the leaves and flowers.

The plants are usually grown with a constant fertilizer injection through the irrigation lines. They may or may not be “pinched” to induce branching and the last pinch will be made the first of August. Mums start to bloom with the onset of short days. The finished plants hit the market around the middle to end of September looking like this:

One of my favorite gardening experiences happened a few years ago when I was asked to have the yard on the mountain ready for an October wedding. Since we had enough notice and enough time, I ordered a thousand rooted mum cuttings to be delivered on the fifteenth of June. The bride-to-be chose the colors. We planted the mums and then pinched the tips often to encourage branching. I fed the plants with liquid fertilizer every week.

I remember being a bit uptight about the thousand plants. The timing had to be perfect. One expert told me that they would never bloom in time for the wedding. A noted horticulturist told us that they would be bloomed out and gone before the wedding. I sort of averaged that out and the plants performed perfectly, being wide open and beautiful to greet all the guests who entered the yard.  Here are a couple of pictures I found—this occurred just before the wide availability of digital cameras.

All of the above is nice—but it’s not really what this article is about. I used the word “concept” in the title. To me, a concept occurs when something happens to make me think about something I never thought about before. I view a concept as a little ball that floats around in one’s peripheral vision, blinking on and off. Every now and then the ball will blink on at just the right time and you can grab it and open it. And what is inside? Questions. Questions that you never thought to ask. The concept then leads to the answers and new found knowledge.

The light for me flashed on one day last year when my mother asked, “Have you noticed that the perfectly grown mums we get these days don’t perform like the old fashioned ones?” She continued, “The old fashioned mums seemed to grow differently and they came back year after year. The new mums may come back for a year or two, but that’s it. I loved the old fashioned mums for cut flowers.”

This was new to me, but I knew just where to go to get the answer—My friend Marion. We discussed it and figured that in breeding the commercial mums, the breeders had paid attention to shape, the size of the flowers. They had bred the mums to bloom a bit earlier in order to lengthen the sales window before winter. They had bred out the longevity and the “wildness” of the mum. Marion sent some rooted cuttings of the special plants to my mother who was delighted with them.

I decided that I can relate to the old fashioned mums. They don’t quite fit the generally accepted mold. They bloom profusely, but only when they feel like it, and they spend a lot of time out of bounds. These plants are strong, too and withstand all sorts of adversity, coming back strongly from life threatening forces. Yes, I can relate to them.

I asked Marion how we would differentiate between the old fashioned mums and the refined ones. I asked, “can we call them ‘old lady mums”? She laughed and said, “Well, I guess so, I got these plants from Virginia Starr before I moved into the Second Avenue house and I lived there 21 years. I still have them here at the mountain house and I have been here for 29 years.”

So, I have her permission-She is definitely a lady, and she is proud of being “old” (of course, she’s pretty close to my age and that makes her young as far as I’m concerned).

I noticed a large stand of mums that looked like they would be late bloomers. I can relate to that, also. Marion told me that these were the yellows and that they will bloom around November 9. She said they loved the frost. The plants were tall and straggly. I can relate to that, also.

Marion showed me one last plant just starting to flower. She said, “I don’t know where the apricot colored mum came from. It just showed up one day. The only thing I can figure is that a couple of the other ones cross pollinated and spread their seeds.”

So far, that’s as far as I’ve gotten into the concept. Marion told me that the pink mum is named Ryan’s Daisy and that she bought it from Blue Stone Perennials  That’s a new one for me, also. I guess I have some work to do because I WILL have me some “old lady mums” in my garden next year.

As usual, I would just love for you click here to go to Amazon and purchase the ebook edition of my wonderful book, Requiem for a Redneck to go on your Kindle. I have also noticed that Amazon now has a free Kindle app for iphones and tablets. Is that cool or what?

If you want a consultation in your yard in N.W. Georgia, send me an email at wherdepony@bellsouth.net