Timely Bloomers

You know how the landscape designers and the master gardeners and retired folks who have nothing else to do say you should plan your gardens so you have something blooming in your yard year ‘round? Well, that’s hard enough, but I can go them one better. How about planting particular flowers to bloom and fade, bloom and fade every hour? How’s that for a challenge?

There really is such a thing as a Flower Clock. Seems that botanist Carolus Linnaeus back in the 1700’s hypothesized that flowers could predict or indicate the time by when they bloomed.

Linnaeus, being one of those people who had entirely too much time on his hands, determined that it would be necessary to use three types of garden plants to make up the clock: flowers that change their opening and closing according to the weather, flowers that change their opening and closing depending on the length of the day, and flowers that have a set opening and closing time. The bottom line here, after all his work and study, is that plants have a biological clock just like humans.

Unfortunately, good ol’ Carolus somehow neglected to leave us a list of this plants, or at least a list that we can use this day and time (pardon the pun). His plants were all native to his home in Sweden and so we would need to start from scratch to design a flower clock for Southside Virginia. Really all you need though is several hundred hours of careful observation and observing nature and the weather and the seasons is one of the joys of being a gardener.

Start with a basic design, like a circle to represent a clock face. The circle can be made with rocks or a border of small green shrubs. Divide the clock face into 12 sections to represent the 12 hours of daylight. Position your plants in the clock face to bloom in rotation “around the clock,” so to speak.

I found a list to blooming times for some plants and if they can be grown around here, you might just succeed with your flower clock. Experimenting with this would be fun, however, and a good long-term project.

6 a.m. flax; 7 a.m. marigolds; 8 a.m. dandelion; 9 a.m. calendula; 10 a.m. Star of Bethlehem or California poppies; 11 a.m. Star of Bethlehem; noon morning glories or blue passion flowers; 1 p.m. carnations; 2 p.m. poppies; 3 p.m. calendula closes; 4 p.m. four o’clocks; 5 p.m. coltsfoot; 6 p.m. moonflowers; 7 p.m. white campion; 8 p.m. night flowering cereus.

Of course, there are scads of other flowering plants you can use, and just by observing the favorites you already grow, it would be easy to make substitutions. Watch your own garden and note times of blooms as the summer progresses. Next year you’ll be ready to grow your own clock.