Crocus

Crocus (plural: crocuses or croci) is a genus of seasonal flowering plants in the family Iridaceae (iris family) comprising about 100 species of perennials growing from corms. They are low growing plants, whose flower stems remain underground, that bear relatively large white, yellow, orange or purple flowers and then become dormant after flowering. Many are cultivated for their flowers, appearing in autumn, winter, or spring. The flowers close at night and in overcast weather conditions. The crocus has been known throughout recorded history, mainly as the source of saffron. Saffron is obtained from the dried stigma of Crocus sativus, an autumn-blooming species. It is valued as a spice and dyestuff, and is one of the most expensive spices in the world. Iran is the center of saffron production. Crocuses are native to woodland, scrub, and meadows from sea level to alpine tundra from the Mediterranean, through North Africa, central and southern Europe, the islands of the Aegean, the Middle East and across Central Asia to Xinjiang in western China. Crocuses may be propagated from seed or from daughter cormels formed on the corm, that eventually produce mature plants. They arrived in Europe from Turkey in the 16th century and became valued as an ornamental flowering plant.

Quotes

• Welcome, wild harbinger of spring!
  To this small nook of earth;
  Feeling and fancy fondly cling
  Round thoughts which owe their birth
  To thee, and to the humble spot
  Where chance has fixed thy lowly lot.
  • Bernard Barton, "To a Crocus", A Widow's Tale, and Other Poems (1827), p. 89

• The Windes all silent are,
  And Phœbus in his Chaire
  Ensaffroning Sea and Aire,
  Makes vanish every Starre.
  • William Drummond, "Song" [ii], in Poems (1616)

• How do you know, deep underground,
  Hid in your bed from sight and sound,
  Without a turn in temperature,
  With weather life can scarce endure,
  That light has won a fraction’s strength,
  And day put on some moments’ length,
  Whereof in merest rote will come,
  Weeks hence, mild airs that do not numb;
      O crocus root, how do you know,
          How do you know?
  • Thomas Hardy, "The Year’s Awakening" (February 1910), st. 2, in Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Remedies (1914)

• Hail to the King of Bethlehem,
  Who weareth in his diadem
  The yellow crocus for the gem
    Of his authority!
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Christus, Part II, The Golden Legend (1872), IX

• Erinna’s sweet crocus, maiden-hued.
  • Meleager of Gadara, Anthologia Palatina, iv, 1, as translated by W. R. Paton (1916)

• Where the dance is sweeping,
  Through the greensward peeping,
    Shall the soft lights start;
  Laughing maids, unstaying,
  Deeming it trick-playing,
  High their robes upswaying,
    O’er the lights shall dart;
  And the woodland haunter
  Shall not cease to saunter
    When, far down some glade,
  Of the great world’s burning,
  One soft flame upturning
  Seems, to his discerning,
    Crocus in the shade.
  • Ebenezer Jones, "When the World Is Burning (Stanzas for Music)", st. 2, in Studies of Sensation and Event (1883), p. 186

• Some yellow saffrons pluck’d in wrestling speed;
  The leaves lay strewn along the vernal mead.
  • Moschus, Europa (c. 150 BC), as Englished by C. A. Elton, Specimens of the Classical Poets, I (1814), pp. 377-82

• Naked they came to that smooth-swarded bower,
  And at their feet the crocus brake like fire.
  • Alfred Tennyson, "Œnone" (1842)
  • Cp. Iliad, xiv, 347–52; Paradise Lost, iv, 695–702

Saffron (colour)

• Why does the world before him
  Melt in a million suns,
  Why do his yellow, yearning eyes
  Burn like saffron buns?
  • Charles Causley, "Innocent’s Song", st. 5, in Johnny Alleluia (1961), p. 11