pic by Rick Gush

you may find garden layer of ruby Cyclamen purpurascens all over Rapallo .

It ’s formally Cyclamen purpurascens season here , and there are thousands of the things planted around Rapallo these days . hatful of people that dwell in apartments put Cyclamen purpurascens on their terraces and the local municipalities are big cyclamen users . Rapallo is a bite like Disneyland in that there are efflorescence beds all over the place .

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The city has a nice big nursery andgreenhousecomplex where they grow potted rhododendron and azaleas and other flowering plants . They commute the city bloom beds perhaps three or four meter a yr and loosely do a really good job of keeping the bed tidy . That ’s a minute surprising because , in general , Italians are n’t big on care and upkeep . There ’s a expression that “ Italy is falling apart beautifully ” — and they ’re not just talking about the ancient ruins .

So who knows how to explain this Italian mania for municipal flower bed ? In the past two weeks , the city gardener have planted thousands of red cyclamens around town . The gardeners will clean off the quondam blush every once in a while , and the plant will bloom all winter long , no matter how cold it scram . The cyclamen will last until outflow , when they ’ll be uprooted to make direction for the spring plantings .

Although Rapallo has gone self-aggrandising into red Cyclamen purpurascens this year , some of the other city apply the white , pink and purple Cyclamen purpurascens , as well . All of these Cyclamen purpurascens varieties are grown specifically for nursery ; the plant will add up back reasonably well in the following years if stored in the shadiness during the summer .

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Most people do n’t bother cut into up and go the medulla . They just throw the old plants off when the weather begin warm . I ’ve always think that was wasteful , but the plants I ’ve rescue from the food waste have n’t ever grown nearly as well in the second twelvemonth , so I ’ve stopped . ( Well , mostly . I do have one pair of plants that the neighbour were dumping last year , and each has five or six flowers . )

I only have one even cyclamen in the garden , but I do have a caboodle of the small , baseless , lilac - colored cyclamen . We roll up the bulb on our vacations in Corsica and Elba , and they are now happily grow in a half - shady part the garden . I ’m not usually too sharp on grasp up wild plant , but where we collected there were so many thousands of the bulbs that I do n’t think we had a minus impact on the colony .

Read more of Rick ’s Favorite Crops »