ACIDANTHRA?

What is an acidanthra? I’ll forgive you if you don’t know. But I will tell you about my acidanthra. The earliest among them have just emerged from the shelter of their stocks. Give it another couple of days and the pots will be sporting tall white flowers and smelling wonderful!

Acidanthra; the word caught my attention when Ginger first said it. I had to hold myself back, finish listening to what she was telling me before asking her how to spell it. I was supposed to be working. We weren’t talking about gardening when she mentioned it. We were talking about being sick, and being tired of being sick, and wanting to be well enough to go outside, wanting to plant acidanthra.

“They grow from bulbs,” she said, when I asked her to tell me more about acidanthra. “I’m surprised you don’t know about them. You garden don’t you? You can get them anywhere.”

Spring came, and then summer. One warm day the reception desk at Hope House started smelling wonderful. “It’s these tall white flowers Ginger brought in,” they told me. “We can’t remember what they’re called. She said you’d know what they are.”

“Acidanthra,” I said primly. They were impressed. They asked to spell it.

Usually, I find, when you learn about something new, you start noticing references to it everywhere. You wonder how you managed to miss them for so long. Not so with acidanthra. I did a little research. My spell-checker did not recognize the word. I could find references on the Internet, but then, you can find anything on the Internet. At the start of the next season, when the master gardeners were talking about scented flowers on the phone-in shows, and the newspapers were writing about scented gardens, and nobody was mentioning acidanthra, I took that as evidence that acidanthra must be a rare flower obtained from a secret source known only to Ginger. I set out to prove that acidanthra bulbs are hard to get. Just to be safe, I didn’t go to a greenhouse where I knew there would be knowledgeable well-trained salespeople. I lured David over to the bulb rack at the nearest home improvement store. I spelled acidanthra and set him to searching among the irises and gladioli. Like me, he felt certain it would not be there.

The search was not a long one. It took about three seconds to find acidanthra. We bought nine little bulbs in a mesh bag for a bargain price and took them home, planting them according to the package instructions. Well, let’s just say we sort of followed the package instructions. It’s how we usually deal with instructions.

Nine shoots came up. Nine bulbs produced flowers. Everyone who came to visit noticed them. “What are those lovely-smelling white flowers?” they wanted to know.

“Acidanthra,” we said primly.

By mid-September the flowers had gone, leaving tall green shoots turning to brown. The package instructions never mentioned anything about what to do after you planted the bulbs. There was no more advice to ignore. I dug up the bulbs. The original nine had multiplied to fifteen. We stored them in the garage, in a plastic pail beside the pail of gladiola bulbs. . This year I planted them again and delighted when the shoots came up. I added the word to the permanent dictionary in my spellchecker.

All this I proudly reported to Ginger. Ginger said, “I didn’t know you could keep the bulbs over the winter!”

All of it just proves that there are still a lot of things out there we don’t know.