Enjoy mums while you can

The ‘hardy’ mums we see this time of the year have developed into annuals.

McClatchy Newspapers

CHICAGO — As the gray-brown end of the gardening year approaches, a few bright banners still fly: maples. Asters. Toad lilies. And, of course, chrysanthemums.

As long ago as the 8th century, poets in Japan were praising the chrysanthemum as a symbol of longevity because its blooms endure at the end of the season, according to Margaret Falk of the New York Botanical Garden, where an annual festival of kiku — the Japanese word for mums — runs through Nov. 16.

Though the parent species, and the ancient resonance, probably came from China and Korea, Falk says, it was Japan that perfected the art of breeding mums from simple daisylike flowers into multipetaled fluffs or intricate lacework.

But that kind of mum is not what we buy at garden centers or supermarkets in September, says Tim Pollack, outdoor floriculturist at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe, Ill.

The plants we tuck among our pumpkins or in our front-porch pots are what is often called “garden mums” or “hardy mums.”

So does that mean you can plant them in the garden and they’ll come back next year? Probably not, Pollack says. It’s confusing, but though chrysanthemums are perennials and some older cultivars really could make it through a winter, over the past few decades, they’ve been bred for color and flower form at the expense of hardiness.

In the past 20 years, so-called “hardy” mums “have become annuals,” Pollack says. “They are annuals that can take some cold.”

Even if you stumbled on a truly hardy cultivar, mums grown in pots for sale in the fall won’t have time to develop much of a root system in the ground before the soil freezes. And they likely have been stressed by a greenhouse regime of high-dose fertilizers, growth regulators and light manipulation to trick them into blooming just when retailers want them to.

Your best bet for perennial mums would be to buy the plants in spring and nurture them all summer. But don’t be surprised if, without all that special treatment, they bloom earlier than you figured.

And don’t expect that neat “basketball” shape, Pollack says. Though they can be painstakingly coaxed into many forms, chrysanthemums naturally are stalky and rangy. You can keep a plant more compact by pinching it back several times over the season, he says, but you could never achieve the tidy half-sphere perfected by commercial growers.

So let’s just call mums annuals and enjoy them while they last. Give them soil that drains well, in a generous pot or in the ground. Handle them carefully, because their stems are brittle and snap off easily. And keep them watered; chrysanthemums tend to dry out quickly and don’t recover. If the buds dry out and turn brown, they’re done.

We can be charmed by chrysanthemums well into November, not only in our yards but also at the botanic garden and at the Chicago Park District’s two conservatories.

Park district horticulturist Steve Meyer uses both hardy and florist mums, in a variety of cultivars with staggered bloom times, to keep the show going as late as Thanksgiving. They may not live for years in our gardens, but their brave show can cheer us against the shortening days just as it impressed poets in Japan 1,200 years ago.