This will be the rough effect of the alliums next spring. Photo credit: Nick Fewings

There is something metaphorical about putting a bulb in the ground. This is probably because nearly all of them need to be planted in the fall, when most of the garden’s splendor has fallen off into yellow tatters and the cooling air is already making us brace for a sparer, darker season. But, in the very planting of it, we are creating the promise of something splendid that will arise once winter ends. In that sense, planting anything is an act of faith, since it involves hope in a thing unseen.

Last year, when the Classical Roots Program undertook the almost absurdly ambitious project of planting 10,000 daffodils and tulips in the orchard (with only two bulb planters, no less!), very few of my poor students had any notion of what the end result would look like. All they understood was the backbreaking work of pulling plug after plug from the hard, intractable soil of that space, popping the small white garlicky-looking bulbs into the holes, then putting the plugs back in again. At one point I simply had to gather everyone together and show them images on my phone of the results we were going for. Of course, I should have done this right from the start—it is impossible to do good work without a vision of the goal. And, also of course, their efforts were redoubled once they caught hold of the dream. The results were shockingly good in the end: a nodding sea of yellows, whites, reds, and purples that swelled up from beneath the grass in April.

Even finding the hand-scattered bulbs can be tricky in long grass.

There is very little to criticize about a large field underplanted with daffodils and tulips. Indeed, it had exactly the effect I hoped it would: to convince everyone that the Classical Roots Program was a worthy cause. However, all that delight in the splendor was tempered when the flowers started to go over. By graduation time, the colors had winked out, swallowed by the orchard’s lengthening green. Almost bashfully, some of that year's Seniors told me they had hoped to take pictures in the orchard on graduation day, but decided not to “because there was nothing left to see.”

And while that complaint wasn’t precisely fair, I understood where they were coming from. Gardeners in this part of the world all have to deal, in their own ways, with the famous empty space between the early spring blooms in April and the beginning of summer’s true flowering in June. I’ve sometimes heard it called the “Green Gap,” since there’s plenty of verdure that time of year but relatively little in flower. At CCA, our gardens have a unique need to correspond to the academic year, which means that we will always favor the shoulder seasons in our planting. However, we hadn’t quite met that need if our graduates could look at the orchard in late May with disappointment. In the end, I turned to a classic solution for filling the Green Gap: late-flowering alliums.

Originally native to the dry, mountainous regions of Europe, Asia, and Africa, alliums or ornamental onions are relatives of garlic that produce large spherical bulbs on long stalks, usually white or brilliant purple. And while these plants would be both healthy and charming in any garden with good soil drainage, they are especially noteworthy for their late-spring blooming time—right in the middle of the Green Gap. Thus, they made the ideal candidate for our particular needs and space.

A sucker for the classics, I selected Allium “Purple Sensation,” a particularly tall variety whose electric purple blossoms would have no trouble rising above the long grass of the orchard in late May. This variety is also a good self-seeder, so I went with a modest 1,000 bulbs instead of the heady 10,000 of yesteryear.

Black-Eyed Susans are also thriving in the meadow.

Planting these 1,000 alliums could not have been a more different experience than the labor of the tulips and daffodils last year. What had once been a uniform sward of clipped grass was now a full-grown summer meadow dotted with trees and wildflowers. Though less tidy, the orchard seemed to have grown: there was a sense of being in a place rather than simple on one. What was more, the soil itself told a story of revival: it was now loamy, rich, easier to work, and full of worms.

The first bulbs being planted last year: a striking contrast.

That richness, which is growing ever richer beneath our feet at CCA, is a good reminder of the paradox of organic gardening: the more we feed the soil, the more it will give back. Part of a gardener’s role is control, to be sure. But, like a good teacher, a good gardener knows that they are only the steward of something that must ultimately thrive on its own strength, or not at all. These alliums will add some much-needed color to the orchard next spring. But they will also contribute to its health: a goodness that renders their beauty all the more beautiful.