Colchicum autumnale ‘Nancy Lindsay’

I planted ‘Nancy Lindsay’ last year but couldn’t get a photo then. I have yet to see what the autumnale type looks like, but this flower is much bigger and shaped differently than the C. autumnale ‘Album’ that bloomed for me earlier this fall. I can see why it was originally considered its own species: Colchicum pannonicum, because it doesn’t look much like the species. I don’t know who decides these things, or how they inform the rest of the world of their decisions. I would like to be more in the loop.

Anyway, I bought ‘Nancy Lindsay’ because she was said to have a purple “stem” (technically a perianth tube). I especially love colchicums with purple tubes, but they often prove elusive. Bowles describes the “original” C. speciosum as being “distinguished by the deep lilac colour of the tube,” but neither the speciosum I purchased from McClure and Zimmerman nor the one I purchased from Odyssey Bulbs (which I consider a more reliable source) has the purple tube. And I’ve only seen one photograph of it that way, in Andrew Lawson’s The Gardener’s Book of Color. And the colchicum I received as ‘Giant’ had a greeny-yellow tube, but the one the Bookish Gardener ordered had a purple tube. (Both from the same company, several years apart.) Ah, Chan, I covet your ‘Giant.’