Do you ever buy those cheerful bouquets just inside the door at the supermarket? I'm not crazy about chrysanthemums, but they look awfully inviting at this time of year. My old habit of counting pennies, however, is still just strong enough so that I can never quite bring myself to indulge and buy one of these happy harbingers of spring. Forcing a few branches of forsythia is a poor substitute. Collecting a bouquet of pussy willows from the swamp down the road isn't much better.
I've forced a variety of shrubs into bloom over the years, but none recently, so since I don't enjoy writing about things I haven't experimented with myself, I went out on a relatively warm day in late January and cut a variety of twigs from shrubs in the yard so I could write about them.
A really nice warm day when the sap is running is the time to cut branches for forcing. It was about 40 degrees the day I went out, so the sap in my branches wasn't even walking, much less running, but it felt positively hot after the zero temperatures we'd been having.
To soothe my branches after the trauma of being cut I gave them a nice warm soak in the bathtub for 24 hours. Fortunately Hank is quite tolerant about such things if I claim they're "research." He actually prefers showers to baths anyway. My next step was to split the ends of each branch vertically two or three times so it could absorb as much water as possible.
This is difficult to do without aiming the knife toward yourself, so be careful and do it when your husband isn't around to criticize - unless you think he might offer to do the job for you. There are people who smash the twig ends with a hammer, but I don't think the delicate capillary tubes are anything but bruised and swollen by this sort of treatment.
Once I'd found a sufficient number of vases, bottles and buckets, I filled each one with warm water and branches. I'd cut forsythia, quince, apple, plum and dogwood. Placing containers in a warm room definitely hurries the forcing process, but it also dries out the buds unless they are misted daily. Since I couldn't put my hands on my spray bottle, I periodically took different collections out to the kitchen and poured warm water over them in the sink.
All this was pretty tedious, especially considering the resulting blooms, but having spent so much time on it I'm darned if I'm not going to write about it. I'm afraid it was really too early in the year to attempt an experiment in forcing, but now that March is right around the corner, you'll probably do just fine if you'd like some cheerful signs of spring decorating your livingroom.
My biggest success was the quince. Although its blooms are not the beautiful salmon pink nature produces outside, their pale pink blossoms are quietly pretty. The buds at the ends of the branches are not open yet so my picture isn't very showy.
I just couldn't make the apple blossoms open for their picture. There are more than two dozen ready to burst, but they're just poking along, probably grousing about the freezing February weather. I'm sure their flowers will be pure white without any pink and I won't get a whiff of the perfume that always fills the house from blossoms cut in May. The forsythia turned into a mystery. I was sure I'd cut branches with plenty of buds, but they turned out to be nothing but leaves, so I got lots of greenery, but only two yellow blooms.
The biggest disappointment was the dogwood. I'm afraid it was just too early to expect this handsome tree to bloom in February. I can remember forcing dogwoods many years ago with great success, their bracts (dogwood blossoms are made up of four white bracts which surround the true flowers) lasting almost three weeks and looking as if I'd hired a professional flower arranger to set them in their vase.
We have no witch hazel on the property, but it is one of the easiest shrubs to force as it blooms outside in April. I didn't bother to go up to the pasture where we have a stand of pussy willow, but these fuzzy catkins are easy to force. They will last indefinitely, provided the water is removed from their vase once they've opened. If left in water they will continue growing until they've become unsightly.
Yesterday I went to the supermarket, primed to buy one of those cheerful bouquets of chrysanthemums, having realized it could be considered a deduction on my income tax. Wouldn't you know - there were only bouquets of Peruvian lilies, Alstroemeria, the color of rusty iron. They looked very tired and I couldn't bring myself to spend $4.99 plus tax for something that didn't even look spring-like. .
