The bulb detector.

Where is an inventor when you really need one? Every fall, our friend Ben laments the fact that no one has yet invented a bulb detector. (As in metal detector, not lie detector.) Think how useful it would be to have this handy-dandy invention to sweep along your garden beds as you ponder where to put that peony or package of daffodil bulbs or potted mum that’s ready to leave the deck for its permanent home! As you stare at the bare ground, you just know that wherever you put the spade, you’re going to chop through at least one precious bulb.

Spring-flowering bulbs are so inconsiderate that way. True, once their spectacular flower display is over, their foliage is nothing to write home about. In the case of daffodils and tulips, it’s so homely it’s one of the strongest arguments I know for interplanting. But still, you’d think that instead of mercifully departing each summer, just when you think you can’t stand to look at it another second, it would at least have the decency to leave a tidy, discreet little marker behind so you could find the stupid bulbs when fall planting time rolled ’round.

Instead, we hapless gardeners are told to mark each bulb’s resting place ourselves, with golf tees or little flags or the like. How totally attractive! Here at Hawk’s Haven, we can in fact think of a good use for little flags: To mark where our black German shepherd, Shiloh, has chosen to take a bathroom break in the backyard so we can find it and clean up once she’s back in the house. But one flag for one hour is not a sea of flags (or tees) in your garden beds for months. What are these helpful people thinking?!!

Our friend Ben would like a handy bulb detector instead, one with a screen that would actually reveal the shape and size of the bulb, corm, rhizome, fleshy root, or whatever as you passed the detector over it. Would I still manage to slice a few bulbs? You betcha. But at least damage control would be in place. So if any inventors are reading this…