I really hope the tulips of the world won’t take this personally, because I love them, really I do, but they’re not my favorite flower. Michael Pollan has a great way of describing tulips in the Botany of Desire — they’re Apollonian beauty. Simple. Perfect. Male.

I’m delighted to see them every spring, but my heart belongs to a decidedly more feminine spring flower. The ranunculus. They’re a profusion of crepe-paper petals. Like roses, like peonies, they’re all about sumptuous overabundance. They’re petals and petals and petals. They’re too much. Which I think is just enough. Yeah yeah, Apollo. I’ll go for Aphrodite every time.

Yesterday, something out of Greek myth took over me, because I ordered 240 ranunculus bulbs online. I was not drunk. Or at least not drunk drunk, maybe just flower drunk. You see, Trader Joe’s had a bunch of ranunculus for sale. I bought them. I put them in a vase on my desk. They were so pretty! I’m looking at them right now. Oh wow, do they ever make me swoon.

During yesterday’s swoon, I remembered the ranunculus I grew last spring. I remembered how gorgeous they were. Visual evidence:

Then I also remembered there just weren’t enough of them. Also, that they were expensive to buy full grown. And then I discovered that it’s $10 for sixty bulbs straight from Holland. It would have been a crime to buy fewer than several hundred…

“But isn’t it too late to buy bulbs?” I hear your concerned gasps. Nope! Ranunculus aren’t like tulips and daffodils. They don’t need a sustained period of cold before blooming. In fact, if you leave the bulbs in the ground all winter in cold climates, they often won’t survive. Planting them in the spring is just perfect.

That said, should you care to join me in the ranunculus madness, do it soon. They don’t need cold, but they do need cool.

Tags: flowers, ranunculus