Flowers: A Matter of Timing

I'm headed over to AGBT Agriculture tomorrow, after getting to Phoenix ahead of time to check out some sights.  The Desert Botanical Garden is amazing, particularly since it stays open until 10pm and so you can watch the lighting change as the sun sets and then enjoy some artistic artificial lighting on some of the trails.  Before I left, a few daffodils were in bloom back at my home.  So while I have plants on the mind, I'll unleash another plant engineering fantasy but this time with a dose of contemplation whether it would really be a good idea.  What if we could engineer flowers to show up at any time we wanted?

First daffodils of the season

Spring bulb plantings go through a very standard succession of blooms, which I will compress a bit here.  First come snowdrops, then the small ("snow") crocus, then the earliest daffodils and then tulips and finally alliums. I've left a few others out I don't plant as much.   There's a progression of daffodil varieties and similarly tulip varieties can be organized by bloom time.  

The exact timing of these events has many environmental modifiers.  There was a building in Kendall Square area, since demolished and replaced with a much taller building, which I was jealous of its beds as those bulbs bloomed several weeks before mine.  First they were in Cambridge, and so a heat island effect sped their blooming some, but even more so they were behind a brick wall that received a great deal of sunlight during the day, so the local warming was quite great.

Perhaps my greatest frustration with bloom times is in an herb sold as pineapple sage.  This native of Mexico does have a lovely fragrance if you bruise the leaves - definitely adjacent to pineapple - and slender red flowers.  Well, when you buy the plants in the spring they have flowers but soon those disappear - only to return in fall right around the time the first frosts can hit - and this species has zero frost tolerance.

Bloom times also can have cultural significance.  Walt Whitman's poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd is an allegory for the loss of President Lincoln, which was roughly aligned with when lilacs will bloom farther south in the US.  In Boston, there's actually a lilac festival at Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, the date of which is not announced until a relatively good read on the peak blooming period is predictable.  

What if we could change all that?  What if daffodils could be engineered to bloom in July?  Or pineapple sage to bloom all summer long?  Or lilacs in October?  

From a garden design standpoint, more variety is going to be a good thing.  But would we be losing something if any flower could bloom at any time?  Of course, there are tricks with greenhouses or refrigerating bulbs which can alter bloom times - so called "forcing" of bulbs to enable them to bloom earlier than their typical time.  But real control through genetic engineering?

And what sort of control?  The simplest - but probably not simple at all - would be to engineer a change based around day length or simply make blooming uncoupled from day length.  But that's probably not simple at all in the case of a bulb or corm which typical emerges and immediately blooms.  Not that these can't bloom other than spring - saffron crocus is a fall bloomer - but that might put some extra roadblocks.  But to engineer a lilac to bloom in September instead of May, that seems doable.

All of these plants bloom timings are the result of evolution and for survival in their natural habitat.  In New England (and also where I grew up in Pennsylvania), there is the arum known as skunk cabbage which lives in wet areas of deciduous forests.  Swamp cabbage avoids being shaded out by emerging and flowering very early - so early it generates its own heat to melt the snow it is buried by!  Also, since the more popular pollinators aren't around so early, the flowers have a somewhat foul scent (hence the moniker) and attract flies.  A huge fraction of popular ornamentals are not native to North America and live as pampered pets in gardens, so altering the bloom time wouldn't degrade their ability to survive.

So should horticultural genetic engineers tinker with bloom times?  I think I'd like it, but maybe what makes the wonderful smell of lilac so wonderful is I know I must savor it for a short window each year - if they bloomed all summer maybe it would become too commonplace?  Between global commerce and hothouses, we've already divorced most produce from any strict seasonality - in my father's youth strawberries were either early or late summer fruit but of course now the markets always have them.

What do you think?  Edit away or leave flower bloom times to their evolutionary history and a bit of environment?