Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, Mani the purebred border collie, filling in for the guy I live with, and here today to talk about fritillarias. You may remember me from such posts as “At A Distance”, among so many, many others.
Here I am in a characteristic pose.
There’s the purple-lived hybrid peach or whatever, and you can see how the native warm-season grasses don’t contribute a very spring-like look, but they will, later.
The guy I live with is reading a lot of discouraging things about water restrictions and the frightfully low snowpack, but those things usually don’t affect this garden much. There are only a couple of places in the garden that need anything like regular watering.
So anyway it’s my job today to talk about fritillarias. Someone has to do it.
You can see that the “header” was changed. It’s Fritillaria pallidiflora, a Chinese species used in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Obviously it’s easy to grow.
The name fritillaria comes from the Latin fritillus, for dice box, and no doubt the box was checkered in some way or the dice made it look like that. The guy I live with said more research is necessary on his part. The fritillary butterfly is named for that checkering, too.
Not all fritillarias are checkered.
One of the most famous is Fritillaria imperialis. Here are some flowering under the hedge of New Mexican privets, Forestiera pubescens.
They have a smell. I’ve talked about this before. Some people say skunk, some people say half like a fox, half like garlic.
The guy I live with said that’s not exactly what they smell like, and I immediately understood, because I notice that smell, sometimes, on my evening walks. I have an excellent sense of smell. The guy I live with said he was certain other people weren’t growing Fritillaria imperialis.
The big stinky bulbs don’t need to be planted on their sides, like some people say.
There is a non-stinky species, which is now very hard if not impossible to find, since the bulb company the guy I live with bought them from is no longer in business.
This is Fritillaria eduardii.
This is the white form of Fritillaria meleagris. The purple form, more often seen, is checkered, and meleagris means “checkered like a guinea fowl” in ancient Greek. There were some of the purple ones in the shade garden but they probably got wiped out when the new gas line was put in.
This is Fritillaria latakiensis. It’s very similar to Fritillaria elwesii, but not quite like it.
This is elwesii.
Here’s Fritillaria thunbergii, just starting to flower.
The guy I live with doesn’t know what this is, since the label has disappeared. There’s a place online to look this up, called Fritillaria Icones.
This is one starting to flower, too, and he’s not sure what this is.
It looks kind of grabby to me.
This is Fritillaria crassifolia, a really little fritillaria. The flower is the size of a grape.
The guy I live with forgets the name of the larger one next to it.
And finally, a very different one, sometimes put in a separate genus, Korolkowia.
This is Fritillaria sewerzowii. (The guy I live with says that if an English-speaking botanist has transliterated the Russian name it might be spelled severtsoffii.)
This was flowering happily when it was about 90 degrees F last week.
This is one called ‘Ornament’.
These have finally produced some seeds which the guy I live with just buries in the soil, and some seedlings have appeared. It may have been too hot for seeds to have formed this year.
Well, that’s all I have for today. Kind of a lot, really.
I’ll leave you with a picture of me, showing how green the grass is now. That path will never have grass on it because so many people and dogs walk on it.
The guy I live with does wish the county would come by and mow all that dry grass and pick it up. Compost is very important, though we don’t use it in the way other people do, and maybe I’ll talk about that some time.
Until next time, then.
the miserable gardener 
I would love to hear how your guy uses compost! Where I live just announced with great fanfare that they will now pick up compostable things in a special can so no one has to compost. I personally love my compost pile – had a neighbor say that she was afraid her little dog would somehow get bones from my pile (through the fence and compost chicken wire?). I told her no one here eats things with bones and if we did we wouldn’t put the bones in the compost, but I also relocated my pile farther from the fence in case…. People are interesting.
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Maybe in the next post or after that.
Those are wonderful and fascinating fritillaria; I had no idea there were so many, nor that they were such early spring bloomers. About 5 years ago I tried to grow the commonly available checkerboard kind, and got maybe 2 blooms, so gorgeous and interesting, but never to be seen again. I attributed it to the plant’s need for water (according to the internet) and my extremely dry garden. As plants they are so interesting, though, so alien to a perspective expecting tulips and daffodils.
I would like to second “kittenfresh” above and request more on how you handle compost, practically and philosophically. I remember (perhaps incorrectly?) about a certain agave corpse being placed in a ‘secret compost’ behind a Philadelphus lewisii mock orange….
Yes, the “snakeshead” fritillary does need way more water than a lot of the others.
There is a secret compost pile, and a bunch of useless ones, too.
But the guy I live with says he has this figured out. I guess we’ll see.
Ah! That explains it – the “snakeshead” one I got, easily available, requires lots of water, whereas the other more rare ones are more suitable to life on the front range. Sigh.
Also, I just noticed that you have changed your blog’s banner image/header (?) from snowdrops to fritillary!
Yes, the guy I live with says the “snakeshead” is more suitable to a constantly damp area, which is hard to find around here.
Now that Odyssey Bulbs has gone out of business (they were in the northeast, though there’s still Odyssey Perennials which is work checking out) the rarer frits are impossible to find, though you can get Fritillaria imperialis and F. persica at any garden center. The former does smell very strongly like ganja, and you can smell the bulbs in the ground when they start into growth.
The “header” is F. pallidiflora, used in Traditional Chinese Medicine to treat coughs, etc. He grew these from seeds many years ago. But you can get these from John Scheepers or their wholesale company Van Engelen.
A wonderful selection, all very beautiful. I’m surprised F. meleagris does well for you in your very dry conditions. We associated it with damp riverside meadows. It does very well here for me in grass
Thanks. Yes, you’re right, F. meleagris is not suited to this garden, though the white one is in a place that gets regular water. Once a week or every ten days.
Camassias don’t do well here, either.
And Camassias can be a nuisance here, producing enormous amounts of foliage which invariably falls and flops about on top of other plants.
Some people grow them here, with lots of watering. The guy I live with tried camassias. For a year.
So many gorgeeus flowerss Mani an Guy! Guy yore an amazin Gardener! Mani yore a wunderfull Snoopervisor…. Happy Spring to you both! Mani you look ADOORBSS purr usual.
~~head rubss~~ BellaDharma~~ an ((hugss)) BellaSita Mum
Had a flock of mixed varieties of Helmeted Guinea Fowl (Numida meleagris) on the farm until coyotes finally got them all after 10 years. Very amusing and easy to keep. There are also Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) in the fields many mornings.
The guy I live with thought about “renting” some guinea fowl when we had that terrible infestation of grasshoppers.
He said “Guinea fowl, plus a purebred border collie with a high prey drive; what a combination.”
We had a European bred Doberman. Only had to pry a Guinea out of his mouth once. He snatched it 6 feet high out of the air. Great athletes.
The guy I live with said that sounds like Flurry, the first purebred border collie who lived here.
But it was a wedge of Stilton and he was lying on the ground.
Yes, that is kind of a lot of fritillaria to keep track of. The guy you live with is obviously very fond of them to grow so many unusual species.
There are a lot here. Unfortunately the very beautiful ones from Central Asia died out here.
There were some from California, too, but maybe they died out.
I think that most of the North American Fritillaria are native to California. Some are popular with those who like native species.
The guy I live with says you’re right. They’re also very popular with serious bulb growers across the Atlantic. Who by the way grow them better than almost anyone else, except for the ones in the native habitats.
Despite maybe a dozen attempts, I haven’t been very successful with Fritillarias. I’ve got one F. meleagris that has come back for a few years now, but most of the others never came up or came up once and then disappeared after that. Last year, I planted two F. affinis from one of the local native plant nurseries. They came up this spring. I am impressed by the number of different species you have – the F. thunbergii, F. latakiensis, and F. sewerzowii are my favorites of the bunch. I had to look up who Henry Elwes was after seeing F. elwesii (and remembering Galanthus elwesii from my own garden).
The guy I live with said it’s hard to tell what will do well in other peoples’ gardens (well of course), but that Fritillaria imperialis is grown in England, so it must be amenable to cultivation elsewhere. F. sewerzowii maybe not so much.
There are a bunch of species available from places like Scheepers and their wholesale division Van Engelen (you have to buy a lot, though). That may be a good place to start.
The western North American frits are not terribly happy here. The guy I live with has grown a few of them, but the weather here in the last few years has been bizarre, and maybe those frits aren’t into bizarreness.