Mid-Atlantic Gardening: Worth the extra work?, 1 by dayli

dayli wrote:
I remember tuberoses from my great grandmother's garden. The flowers on a stem open from the bottom to the top. If you cut them and bring them into the house, the flowers will continue to open over a period of days. They are incredibly fragrant!

Polianthes tuberosa, native to central America, cultivated by the Aztecs and brought to Europe by the Spaniards, are now grown commercially all over the world for their perfume.

A couple of years ago one of the women at our local farmers' market who sells beautiful bouquets of cut flowers, brought a small bucket of tiny tuberose bulbs to sell "2 for a dollar." I bought 6. She told me that they probably wouldn't bloom the first year, but 2 of them did. I had seven flower stalks this past summer.

Now for the bad news--they are not hardy north of zone 8. So they need to be dug up at the end of every summer and replanted every spring. For me the fragrance is more than worth the trouble. How do you all feel about high maintenance flowers. What is a lot of trouble to grow that you grow anyway?