These tubers are poisonous, but they add a lot of color to your garden | Living

It is late August and the garden is tired and dusty. The leaves of the fruit trees are already starting to fall off and those of the perennials are getting brown edges. When you walk on the grass in the morning, your shoes are wet with dew. So much for my mood painting.

But not all plants are on their way to the end. Some bulbous and tuberous plants are just now starting to flower. They act as if a second spring is beginning. These bulbs have a reverse cycle: they bloom in autumn and winter and disappear underground again at the end of the following spring. They are summer sleepers. They come from countries around the Mediterranean Sea where they spend the dry summer safely underground to shoot like mushrooms after the first autumn rains.

Because our climate is starting to resemble that of Italy and Greece more and more, we also have more and more of those autumn-flowering bulbs are enjoying themselves in our garden. The first ones are already blooming. These are the cyclamen and the autumn crocuses.

Perhaps because this year’s autumn rains already fell in the first weeks of August, the cyclamen in many gardens were already in bloom in the first week of this month. You can buy that garden cylamen – the scientific name is Cyclamen hederifolium – in two ways: as a dry tuber that has not yet bloomed because it has come from the cold store, and as a flowering plant in a pot. The dry tuber is a lot cheaper than the flowering cyclamen in a pot, but it doesn’t always catch on easily. Expect that part of the tubers will disappear instead of growing. The tuber that is sold in a jar usually catches on.

The autumn crocus is also sold as a dry bloomer. You can place the dry tubers on the windowsill where they will bloom without water or soil. Do not throw them away after flowering, but plant them in the garden. There they will produce a large clump of leaves next spring and bloom again in the fall.

Don’t send me an email that the tubers are poisonous, because I know that.

A bulb that you never used to see blooming at our latitude is the Sternbergia, which is also called autumn daffodil, but which looks more like a large yellow crocus than a daffodil. But the name is correct: the Sternbergia is indeed part of the daffodil family. You can see that in the bulb that looks like that of a daffodil.

Plant Sternbergias in a place that is as warm and dry as possible, for example against a south wall where they can take advantage of the heat that is stored during the day and radiated again at night. On heavy soil, such as clay, when planting the Sternbergia bulbs, you can mix in some rubble or gravel.