Have you ever visited a botanical garden on a warm spring day and marveled at tulips in a rainbow of colors, with shapes ranging from cups to stars, contrasting striations, and ruffled edges?Now’s your chance to bring a taste of that awes
12.06.2023 - 01:11 / gardenerspath.com / Lorna Kring
How to Grow and Care for Hyacinth Flowers HyacinthusHyacinths are a perennial, bulbous spring flower from the genus Hyacinthus in the Asparagaceae or asparagus family.
Sweetly fragrant with a delicate, fresh scent, each hyacinth bulb produces 4-6 narrow, upright leaves and 1-3 spikes of fragrant star-shaped flowers in colors of blue, lavender, purples, orange, peach, salmon, red, pink, yellow, and white.
Winter hardy in zones 4-8, these pretty, perfumed blooms enjoy full or partial sun and typically appear from March to April, growing to a height of 8-12 inches.
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Native to the eastern Mediterranean basin, Asia Minor, and parts of the Middle East, the Dutch hyacinth, H. orientalis, is the common garden variety –not to be confused with the much smaller flowers of the genus Muscari, known as grape hyacinths.
Cultivation and HistoryH. orientalis is the single species that gave rise to the extensive range of florists’ hyacinths and garden varieties available today, with cultivated cross-breeding dating back as far as the sixteenth century.
Popular throughout antiquity, hyacinths were extensively cultivated in gardens of the Ottoman Empire. The flowers were first introduced to Europe in the mid-1500s when a Flemish diplomat sent home a package of exotic Eastern bulbs from the court of Suleiman the Magnificent.
Their appeal quickly caught on, and in the eighteenth century, the first double cultivar was produced – with a single bulb fetching the handsome price of 1000 gold florins! And at one point in the heyday of bulb mania, there were over 2000 varieties of hyacinths available.
Today, just over 60 hyacinth cultivars are
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