Thank you, ace photographer Ema:
Did you know that tulips come in a variety of shapes?
I didn’t, until a spring visit to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. We were there to see the cherry trees and yellow magnolias when we came across rows and rows of lovely tulips.
Here is a sample. Which one is your favorite? (For me, it’s a tie between the Yellow Pomponette and the Blue Spectacle because they both look so unlike my idea of a “regular” tulip):
FlairSweet Sixteen
Dordogne
Black Parrot
Spring Green
Purple Prince
Yellow Pomponette
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Send me pictures, people! Surely there are some harvest photos now — from your local farmers market, if not your own gardens?
What’s going on in your gardens, this week?Reader Interactions
28Comments
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NotMax
Tulip pride.
;)
MagdaInBlack
I love tulips almost as much as I love iris. I pick Sweet Sixteen and Courtine Parrot.
Jeffg166
Quite a display.
eclare
So pretty! I am partial to Blue Spectacle.
Mel
All of them are so lovely, but the Yellow Pomponettes and the Blue Spectacles are especially pretty to my eye.
kalakal
Lovely to see. The Prinz Armin for me
JPL
Beautiful!
evodevo
I became happily aware of different tulips when I bought some bulbs as a souvenir at Schiphol airport one time…the blooms had pointed petals instead of the usual round ones and were bi-colored red and white…I was amazed…
satby
Well, most of us who grow them knew they come in different shapes and varieties 😉. But they all are unfailingly beautiful to me, even if the squirrels and up making off with the bulbs sometimes.
I have often mentioned colorblends.com as one of my favorite places for bukbs, but they have a minimum purchase that can be hard to meet unless you need to redo a yard or do a group buy. So lately for smaller purchases I’ve been pretty happy with Brecks, which sells a wonderful assortment of double tulip bulbs, Ema’s favorite! If course, this year I had to get some Valdivia tulips, because of course!
satby
@NotMax: that is beautiful.
satby
@satby: sorry for the typos. Moar coffee.
Jeffg166
@satby: I throw chicken wire down on top of areas of newly planted bulbs to keep the squirrels from digging them up. Take it up in the spring when the first tips of the bulbs appear.
delphinium
I like the Foxy Foxtrot tulip the best.
@satby: That Valdivia tulip is lovely!
Geo Wilcox
So pretty and it makes me sad. When my husband was flying international routes he would buy bags of tulips from the Netherlands and I planted them in a triangular garden. The first year they bloomed it was spectacular but it never got cold enough for them to bloom the following year .No way was I going to dig up 2500 tulip bulbs so they petered out after a few years. At least the daffodils stayed and spread out.
Every so often a lone tulip will shoot up leaves but never any flowers.
Charluckles
Dordogne is an absolutely gorgeous tulip. It’s a strong grower and the color change as the flower matures is stunning. One of my favorite flowers.
I am wondering about recommendations for a book about bulbs? Anyone have a bulb “bible” that they really love?
BenInNM
I like the Black Parrot – both the color and the shape. The tulips I plant never really thrive. They’re always small and the flowers just don’t look great. I have beautiful deep purple irises though that do great. The daffodils I’ve planted also do well so I don’t know what the problem is with the tulips.
satby
@delphinium: Isn’t it? Couldn’t resist it, or the Orange Princess one either!
@Jeffg166: I used coffee grounds to deter the squirrels when I planted gladiola bulbs where my lost lamented double tulip bulbs had been, with mixed success. I’ll try chicken wire next year. I have to lift the glad bulbs anyway, so that’s where Valdia is going. Thanks.
We’re going into another heatwave with high humidity and smoke from Canada for the next week. So today I have to go plant 10 more daylilly fans I ordered, another mixed lot so surprises for next summer. Then a deep watering of everything, because I won’t be venturing out much. My weather report is helpfully warning that risk to asthmatics will be high this week. But one of my canna lillies is showing yellow flower buds and I’m so anxious to see it bloom.
Edit, OMG autocorrect!
Kay
I love the peony-flower tulips. “Foxy Foxtrot” is one. When they first came out, probably 30 years ago, I bought a bunch of “Angelique” (a pink peony flowered tulip) and planted them at a house we were renting. I think the traditional tulip is still my favorite, though.
I’m still (slowly) working on the new Michigan garden. I’ve had a lot of visitors this summer so have not made much progress. Yesterday I went to get a screen repaired at Lowes and they had a whole selection of dianthus 1/2 off. I got three “Arctic Fire” pinks (dianthus). Dianthus can be propogated by cuttings so I’ll take some cuttings, dust with rooting hormone and see if I can get enough to use them as a blooming groundcover. I have sandy soil in MI so very good drainage – I have never had that before – and it’s a real joy not to have to worry about lightening up clay and black muck soils for drainage. Also easy as pie to dig.
ema
Thank you all!
satby
@Kay: I killed a lot of stuff in Indiana. South Bend is built on a sand dune with an inch of topsoil, at least my part of it is. So add compost and garden soil to the areas where you plant. And I’ve had great luck with biochar added to compost when planting. Sandy soil drains too well plus doesn’t hold nutients, and your transplants can be starved for water one hot dry day after a good rain, I found out too late for some.
satby
@BenInNM: probably not getting cold enough. Daffodils can have a wider range of zones they do well in, and if you bought them locally they probably only sold the warmer zone ones. Colorblends has a page on it, and some recommendations.
WaterGirl
@Kay: I love Angelique! I have a bunch of them. There is also a white tulip that’s similar.The smaller peony look ismy favorite kind of tulip.
Lapassionara
Great photos. Thanks for sharing.
Miss Bianca
That Yellow Pomponette (I love that name!) looks like a rose to me.
Gvg
Unfortunately I know a lot about the tulip varieties. My mother was from Wisconsin of Dutch extraction and married a Floridian. She tries to grow tulips. This means buying a couple of hundred bulbs ordered months in advance, getting them in fall early enough to refrigerate them for 16 weeks in 2 small dorm fridges in the garage and them planting them between thanksgiving and Christmas every year for decades now. She keeps notes about what varieties do well enough and which companies bulbs are better results with the same variety. Now she is getting very frail and I am mostly the one who plants. I am not fond of cold weather and I mean cold by Florida standards. I am rather tired of it. I like the way they look, but it’s ridiculous to keep planting them in Florida.
However if anyone in slightly less tropical settings wants a recommendation, Purple Prince is the most reliable. If you want them to come back and rebloom you have to treat them like a crop and feed them. Manure, heavy feeding while growing. Takes about 3 years in Holland I understand. I nature probably longer. A naturalized stand would have multiple years of bulbs growing together, some mature, some still growing. If they don’t have enough food, the bulbs get smaller and die out. Critters eat them too.
Kristine
Lovely photos–thanks for posting! I especially like the Prinz Armin and the Courtine Parrot.
The arborist came by early last week to check out the bur oak that I was concerned about. Yup, oak wilt. But burs are white oaks, which means it’s treatable. It also isn’t very far along—only a few outer branches appear to be affected—and the arborist feels it may be more a sign the tree is stressed than a full-blown infection. He said the weather—alternating years of torrential rains followed by drought, heat, climate change—is stressing all the trees.
They will also fertilize the oaks, treat my two sad blue spruce for needle cast, and prune the dwarf crabapples that are too close together and have interlaced canopies as a result. I said that if I could go back to 2004, I would have them planted 10′ farther apart. Arborist said he hears that a lot.
satby
@Gvg: Honestly, if I lived in a hotter zone like the deep south I would limit myself to growing a few tulips in pots, so I could lift and refrigerate the bulbs easily each fall. But there’s so many beautiful flowering tropicals to grow instead (like cannas!) that I honestly wouldn’t bother. Instead, I’m doing cannas in pots 😂
StringOnAStick
There’s also species tulips, which are the old wildflower versions that modern tulips were developed from. They are much smaller in height and unique in form, but I find they are the right scale for rock garden plantings, and fit in better in native western landscapes because of their size. The ones I really love are the species daffodils, same smaller scale, interesting shapes but also much tougher and also are not deer candy, like tulips are. Even Lowe’s sells bags of Tete a Tete, a cute little golden daffodil that naturalizes easily. There are also plenty of species daffodils that require a warmer climate, for those in areas without enough cold to grow tulips successfully.
My main complaint about standard tulips is that after a few years they pretty much fade away unless you’ve recreated the Dutch climate and soil conditions, which are the opposite of where I live. I don’t even like being handed a poinsettia because I hate the idea of disposable plants and all the greenhouse costs, the mining of peat for putting soil, the plastic pot and wrapping, and all of it will go to the landfill, and that’s why I don’t grow “regular” tulips. One of the changes being forced on us by climate change is making less use of disposable anything, and mining peat is insane since it is a huge carbon sink that we should be supporting the expansion of, not digging up and throwing away after a few weeks or even a year.