Species Crocus, Kotschy's Crocus, Autumn Crocus

This particular variety of fall crocus has a very dull colour and petite flower. Not a crocus I would recommend for the gardener due to i...Read Morets insignificance.

(Sep 26, 2007) I just bought some of these from Santa Fe Greenhouses (High Country Gardens) in August. I was expecting that I might have ...Read Moreto wait until next fall to see them - but the shoots are poking up just now. I do hope that October isn't going to be too cold for them, and that they will be a darker pink than the pictures I've seen here (the pictures on the box were dark pink), and that they will bloom happily for years instead of contracting whatever virus stops them from blooming.

(Jan 19, 2009) They were not the dark pink color of the advertisement pictures, and some of them seem to have died off. Last fall, some of them did rebloom, but not as many as the first fall. I can already see grass shoots coming up now in 4 spots (I originally bought 10 bulbs), so I know that they didn't all die, but they certainly don't seem to be multiplying/naturalizing as crocuses supposedly will.

Kotchy's Crocus is one of the 30 or so autumn flowering species. (It is often offered in the trade as C. zonatus.) As with most of these...Read More the leaves do not appear until the following spring.

HOWEVER, those I have acquired of Dutch origin seem to have picked up a virus and mutiply rapidly, produce lots of leaves but very rarely flower and when they do they are deformed.

I finally managed to find some healthy corms from Ruksans in Latvia in fall 2002. They have come through two winters in St John's, Newfoundland (Canadian zone 5b), show signs of increase, and seem to be one of the half dozen or so fall flowering species that can cope with our climate. (I remember seeing a large drift of them in grass at Wisley years ago.)

The flowers, which appear here in October, are rather fragile and need protection from the wind, but, now that I have them, I think they have been worth the effort! Since they have no leaves of their own at flowering time a gap amongst other plants is a good location.