TULIP DILEMMA
Right now, as the first daffodils are opening in the warmer, more sheltered spots in my home town, I am awash in a high tide of gardening magazines. Their pages are overflowing with gorgeous photo spreads of spring gardens and all of those gardens are full of tulips. The bright flowers are formally arranged in artistic color combinations, strewn with wild abandon over sumptuous landscapes or massed in borders made up of thousands of individual bulbs.
Those glorious photos make me crazy because tulips can be a challenge. They are among the most beautiful flowers known to man–when they are not devoured by varmints before they bloom. Many varieties flower beautifully the first year, but they never return. Others return, but flower size is much reduced, and eventually only leaves pop up from the ground in the spring. Problems with varmints can be surmounted and repeat blooming is not an issue for those wealthy gardeners and botanical institutions that have the resources to buy and install new bulbs every year. I have only ingenuity, which is sometimes in short supply. It is the tulip lover’s dilemma.
Not long ago I read an article on Great Dixter, the celebrated English garden of the late Christopher Lloyd. Lloyd was renowned for being generous, prickly and opinionated in equal measures. He was also a fabulous gardener, an expert on all kinds of plants and a designer who was willing to think “outside the box” to create striking plant combinations. Lloyd died three years ago and articles since then have focused on how Great Dixter, which is now a public garden, has evolved. By all accounts it is evolving nicely under the direction of Lloyd’s friend and longtime head gardener, Fergus Garrett. The most recent article on Great Dixter focused on the spring flower display and mentioned how Garrett and his crew treat tulips. I was intrigued, because the ideas might help me and other overworked home gardeners figure out what to do with our own plants.
Like many of us, the gardeners at Great Dixter grow all kinds of tulips, including some that have a greater tendency to “perennialize” or return for years after planting, more than others. Good reblooming tulips include many of the popular species types, like the little purple and yellow Tulipa bakeri ‘Lilac Wonder’ and the early-blooming, mid-size clusiana tulips. The enormous Darwin hybrid tulips are also reputed to be good rebloomers, though my own results with them have been mixed. Popular Darwin hybrids include ‘Pink Impression’ and the pink and white ‘Ollioules’.
At Great Dixter, the good rebloomers are left to their own devices in mixed beds. Tulips that are not likely to rebloom are removed from beds after the foliage has died back and replaced with late spring and summer annuals. The bulbs are left in a cool, dry place until fall, when they are replanted. The advantages to this technique are obvious. It is economical, at least in monetary terms, because the gardener can get more than one season of bloom out of each bulb. Installing annuals is less of a problem because you don’t have to worry about digging up bulbs by accident. For at least part of the year, your tulips will be out of the reach of voracious varmints. Instead of spending money to replace bulbs every year, you can add to your collection.
The downside is, of course, the work involved in digging and storing the bulbs. If you have the space in a garage or basement and you have either a relatively small number of tulips or a few garden helpers, it is relatively easy to dig, store and replant. This may be an especially good option for container gardeners.
There is a compromise as well. For the tulips that return with smaller blossoms, simply keep them in the ground, but add new bulbs of the same variety every fall. That way, you will have a mix of blossom sizes within one color scheme and you can increase your stock of bulbs a little each year. When a particular bulb gets to the point that it is only sending up a leaf or two and no flower stalk, it can be removed.
Of course, if you hate tulips, you are all set. Simply plant a lot of reliable, ever-increasing daffodils and avoid the whole bloom/rebloom problem. Varmints hate daffodils, which is another plus.
Many of us though, love tulips for their exuberant colors and forms. And, as the old cliché goes, love will find a way–even if that way involves a lot of digging in the dirt.