Autumn Crocus or Colchicum
That cheerful little toe-tapper of American literature, Edgar Allan Poe, best described the glum rue with which many a gardener views the horticultural devastation of mid-autumn. Poe limns it precisely, in the opening of his poem “Ulalume” (1847).
“The skies they were ashen and sobre;
The leaves they were crisped and sere,
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir:
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.”
As you probably know, a dank tarn can be so off-putting. Your wee patch of loam may not be strewn with listless hollowed stems or clacking with the wind-stirred, papery rattle of defunct grasses or pale with the gurney hues of withered leaflets, but my plot of plants is drear and barren. As well as my sugar maples and ornamental sumacs, whose autumnal raiment rivals kingly robes, one of the plants which well brightens my fall garden is autumn crocus.
This is a misnamed crocus-like corm that blooms not in the spring but in the fall. Its other common names are meadow saffron, naked ladies and colchicum. In its native Europe Colchicum autumnale sends up leaves in the spring which then die down by midsummer. The plant goes dormant for two or three weeks, and then flowers in the autumn, with pale, mauve-pink blooms, which appear in long succession from early autumn sometimes right into early December. In North America, one can buy the corms in August or early September and plant them in the garden where they will bloom quickly.
The giant corms of Colchicum speciosum (speciosus Botanical Latin ‘showy’) produce equally giant flowers in a deep, crimson-purple. The biggest autumn crocus flowers—it is not a crocus and not even related to the Crocus genus—belong to a variety of speciosum and they are white.
Caution: Poison
All parts of autumn crocus are toxic. Colchicum is better in the ground as part of an alpine garden, where little explorers are less likely to eat any parts of this poisonous plant. Colchicine is the chief alkaloid, most concentrated in the seeds and corms. Death has resulted from eating the bulbs as cures for gout and rheumatism. Children who have eaten the pretty flowers have died. Many people buy autumn crocus and let it bloom in a pot at a September window. I hope no kids or family pets think of nibbling.
Etymology of the Plant’s Name
The genus name was conferred by the very father of botanical nomenclature, Linnaeus, who found the Latin word colchicum in the great Roman encyclopedia written by Pliny the Elder, that’s Uncle Pliny, Gaius Plinius Secundus. His nephew left us some wonderful Roman letters. Colchicum was Pliny’s term for meadow saffron, taken from an ancient Greek place name, Kolchis, a city in a country east of the Black Sea, which today includes parts of Armenia and Georgia. The ancient Greek name for autumn crocus was κολχικόν kolchikon. Medea of Greek myth, a notorious maker of poisons, was from Colchis, and the ancient Egyptians and Greeks knew that the corms of autumn crocus were poisonous. A common characterizing epithet of Medea among writers of Imperial Rome was venena Colchica, a free translation of which is ‘venom-stained vixen of Colchis.’
The plant family of colchicum is Liliaceae, the lily family from lilium Latin ‘lily.’ The Latin word is related to Greek leirion ‘lily’ and is one of the ancient, non-Indo-European, Mediterranean flower words. Both Latin and Greek appear to have borrowed the word early from a Coptic form hleli, itself a variant of hreri, all stemming from ancient Egyptian hrr ‘lily.’ The exact colchicum plant is identifiable in a reference embedded in the oldest extant Egyptian medicinal text, the Ebers Papyrus, compiled around 1550 B.C.E.
So, consider, with due caution for its toxicity, the autumn crocus, bringer of petalous exuberance and chromatic delight to the wan gloom of an October garden.
copyright © 2012 William Gordon Casselman
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