The bulb shipments have all arrived now, which is like Christmas coming early. Little brown bags and mesh sacks litter the table on the covered part of the back porch where only a month ago we ate weekend lunches and dinners. Now it is home to all kinds of spring-blooming treasures.
One of those small brown bags holds several Tulipa clusiana bulbs, which are sometimes known as “lady tulips.”
Clusianas are tough little tulips, documented since 1607, and native to an area from Iran to the western Himalayas. In California and the southern United States, they have long been gardeners’ favorites, because they don’t need a long winter chilling period to rise gloriously in the spring.
Growing between ten and fourteen inches tall, clusianas are elegantly slender in bud, with white petals striped in rid. While they may have a ladylike nickname, the flowers fling their petals wide on sunny days to reveal a purple blotch at the base of the petals.
I am trying clusianas for the first time this year after coveting them for ages. Tulips, with their mercurial habit of putting on a fabulous first-year show and playing hard to get in subsequent springs, almost always disappoint me. However, I have had better luck with types like clusiana that are closer to their wild origins. I will plant these with high hopes and crossed fingers. On the practical side, I will also plant them in the sunniest spots with fine gravel added to the planting holes for the superb drainage they prefer. Never let it be said that I do not do my best for my bulbs.
Clusianas were named in honor of Charles de l’Ecluse, a sixteenth century Flemish physician/botanist, sometimes known by the Latin version of his name, Carolus Clusius. The world of horticulture owes Clusius a great deal, as does the entire Dutch bulb industry, which exists largely due to his efforts.
After serving the Holy Roman Emperor, and establishing a botanical garden in Vienna in 1573, Clusius went on to establish a new botanical garden at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. The Leiden garden included plantings of tulip bulbs that Clusius had obtained from diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassador to the court of Ottoman Emperor Suleyman I. The Ottomans were great tulip connoisseurs, planting them in their celebrated gardens and depicting them in many different art forms. Among the tulips that Clusius most likely obtained from Busbecq were the flamed and patterned “broken” tulips that set flower fanciers’ hearts on fire. The tulips Clusius planted at Leiden flowered in 1594, the first of their kind to bloom in the northern Netherlands.
Clusius spent his long career acquiring, cultivating and writing about tulips and other plants. He deplored the commercialism that he observed gradually replacing scholarly bulb exchanges. It is probably a good thing that he died before they heyday of “tulip mania,” which peaked in the Netherlands in 1637 and represented the triumph of commercialism and crowd psychology over both horticulture and common sense.
I try for a modicum of common sense in my garden, knowing full well that my reach always exceeds my grasp in that area. I am starting with a few clusianas this year. The bulbs waiting to be planted are the true variety, with the white and red coloring. The market is full of imposters, including a modern semi-look-alike called ‘Lady Jane.’ That “Lady” is apparently no lady at all, bearing flowers that are larger than those of true clusianas and lacking the purple inner markings.
The Pacific Bulb Society website also mentions a yellow and red variety, Tulipa clusiana var. chrysantha. Soft yellow takes the place of the white on the petals. The website pictures do not show an inner purple blotch. There are, apparently, other modern yellow and red forms as well. They are all pretty tulips, but for now, I am sticking with the classic clusiana.
The time-honored method of creating more tulips of a specific variety is through cultivating bulb offsets; tiny “daughter bulbs” that develop on the sides of mature tulip bulbs. Growers detach the offsets and grow them on until they are of marketable size, repeating the procedure endlessly. Because of that, the clusianas waiting on my porch are direct descendants of the ones that flourished in the time of their namesake, Clusius, and long before. It is comforting and a bit inspiring to have a small link in the very long chain of horticultural history waiting to bloom in my own backyard.