THE ESSAY BELOW WILL INTRODUCE YOU TO MUM CULTURE AND HOPEFULLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO GROW MUMS YOURSELF!
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INTRODUCING THE CHRYSANTHEMUM
by Joel R. Simon
If you came to the Long Island Chrysanthemum Show on 22-23 October 2011, there was nothing wrong with simply enjoying a roomful of beautiful flowers, seeing it all as a kind of riot of color and form.  I myself grew up with chrysanthemums, as my parents, Sidney and Deborah Simon, filled our back yard with them and actively participated in the society which it is now my privilege to lead.  However, while I attended most of the shows through the years, although some knowledge must have rubbed off on me, I myself saw the show as just masses of color, and if I looked closely at any one exhibit, it was to see if it had been submitted by my parents and if it had won any kind of award.
After my mother passed away, my father wished to continue to actively grow mums, and I helped him as much as possible as he was limited physically near the end by a heart condition, and I had to do, under his direction, most of the heavy work (not easy for me, either).  When he too passed on, I decided that, whatever changes or improvements I made to the house that had been my home since just before my seventh birthday, chrysanthemums would continue to grow in our yard and I would do what I could to help keep the society that was such an important part of my parents' lives a going concern.  To that end, I am constantly trying to increase my knowledge about chrysanthemums (and plants in general), as well as how to stage a show and "run" an organization.  As I wrote this (shortly before our 2011 show), I had hopes of entering several mums (mainly in the form of entire plants in pots) as well as a special exhibit of eight plants in my "Radio Flyer" wagon, which I used to transport my mums in and out of the garage each night and morning to fool them into blooming by the show weekend.  Anyhow, the wagon was well received, and the four pots I entered earned two red and one yellow ribbon (and I suspect that the one that did not earn an award was simply not open enough yet, and of course three days later was in full bloom).
JOEL AND HIS WAGON, 8 SEPTEMBER 2011
Anyhow, if you have made it this far into the web site, you would also like to learn more about chrysanthemums, and while whole books have been devoted to the subject of mum culture (see our bibliography elsewhere in the web site), I will attempt in a relatively few words to help you make sense of the wonderful world of this fascinating plant, known to botanists as Chrysanthemum indicum.
Hopefully this introduction will inspire you to learn more about mums and even to grow them yourself.
This would be a good point to pose the question "Why chrysanthemums?"  Why would otherwise sane, intelligent people spend hours of their time planting, staking and tying, watering, pinching, fertilizing, etc. etc. a yard full of plants which only come into bloom a few months of the year?  Why would these same people join and become active in a society devoted just to chrysanthemums, and why would these same people go through all the time and effort necessary to mount even a modest show like ours?  Hopefully the rest of this essay will provide some answers.
Passing through Hicks on the way into our show, you would be struck with the endless beauty and variety of the whole plant world.  Without plants, human beings (and all other members of the animal kingdom) could not exist.  Plants use the energy from the sun to combine carbon dioxide in the air with water (taken in by the plant's roots), the result being the "sugars" which constitute the food we eat.  We in turn digest that food, combining it with oxygen in the air and turning it back into water and carbon dioxide.  The energy released enables us to walk and talk and generally be alive.  The process that plants do is called "photosynthesis," and the process that people do is called "respiration."  Plants could very well exist without animals, as there is plenty of carbon dioxide and water available beyond that produced by animals, but animals could not exist without plants, as food from plants is the only thing animals can eat.  Yes, if you chose to eat nothing but lamb chops, and never allowed any kind of plant material to pass through your lips (not a very wise move), you might continue to exist for a while, but remember that the lamb itself ate grass, a plant.  Of course, not all plants are edible by human beings or other animals, and chrysanthemums themselves are not normally a source of food for humans (although you can find chrysanthemum tea and even packages of cut up mums (which I assume are boiled in soup) in Asian markets.  On the other hand, when an aphid can attach itself to a chrysanthemum, he thinks he is in heaven (hopefully you won't see any aphids on show entries).
Chrysanthemums are members of the "composite" family (which also includes marigolds and zinnias, among others).  This means that the flowers have two distinct parts:  a central "disc" surrounded by "rays."  The discs and rays themselves consist of many individual parts called "florets," each one technically a flower.  Therefore, what we think of as a chrysanthemum "flower" is really a cluster of flowers.  In the case of chrysanthemums, the ray florets have female parts only, and the disc florets have both male and female parts.