Crocus out of focus!

Crocus out of focus!

Rotary International's 'Focus on the Crocus' campaign saw six local clubs teaming up with the city council last autumn to plant bulbs of the Ruby Giant crocus in Riverside Drive and Arbroath Road .  The hope was that the flowers would be in bloom by Rotary Day next Wednesday, but the hard winter has put those plans firmly out of focus! Leisure, arts and communities convener Bob Duncan explained how the purple flowers represent the colour of ink dabbed on a child's little finger to indicate they have been immunised against polio and will help to highlight that this disease still needs to be eradicated in other parts of the world.

The six local clubs - Abertay, Claverhouse, Dundee, Dundee Camperdown, Dundee Discovery and Monifieth & District funded the purchase of 55,000 Ruby Giant bulbs, making it the biggest planting in Scotland, and one of the largest in the UK. 

Similar plantings of a total of 5 million bulbs were made by Rotary Clubs throughout the country with the intention that each year, starting in southern climes then progressing northwards, crocuses would be blooming from the end of January through February, culminating in the week around the annual "Rotary Thanks for Life Day" on 23rd February.

However, thanks to the record low temperatures of the last three months, the bulbs are keeping their heads well down. 

Statistics provided by Marion Grassie, Met Observer at the nearby Scottish Crop Research Institute, showed that the grass temperature was below zero degrees every day in December and on all but three days in January, whilst the mean temperature for the 3-month period November to January was 2.7 degrees lower than the long term average (LTA) at just 1.6