It is not unusual for me to get some sort of gardening catalog all through the year. I must be on someone’s master list as I get things from as far away as Maine and as close as Eugene. What is unusual is for me to receive a catalog I have never gotten before. But this was the case a couple of weeks ago.
It was a tulip catalog from a wholesale nursery in Connecticut. I won’t mention the name as I haven’t tried them out yet and so would not like to recommend a company I know nothing about. But it did have photographs of lovely combinations of tulip colors, and in fact, their claim-to-fame is to be able to combine unusual colors into lovely displays.
The reason I liked this particular catalog though, was the amount of information about the history of tulips and how to grow them. I did know that while tulips are associated with Holland, they originated in Turkey. And I knew that fortunes were won and lost over what particular colors would be popular and hybridized in the 1600’s. What I did not know was that the majority of tulips come from the mountainous regions of Central Asia and the Caucases, where wild varieties can be found growing today. The catalog I received has photos and the opportunity to purchase these wild tulips, which are smaller and look –to my mind – more like a crocus. They grew originally in areas with long, cold winters, cool springs and hot, dry summers.
Well, then, no wonder Tillamook gardeners have problems with their tulips blooming well for one season and then not coming back. Our winters are not cold enough and we get too much rain. But there is a way to help our tulips rebloom for several years.
Tulips as we know them have been bred to produce huge, long-lasting blooms. Their field-grown flowers have been cut off soon after blooming to allow as much energy to be stored in the bulbs and not in making flowers and seed. After they go dormant in early summer, the bulbs are dug, stored in climate-controlled warehouses that mimic the long, hot, dry summer they would have had in their native mountain homes.
In an ordinary garden, instead of the bulbs growing larger, the tulip bulbs will split and form smaller bulblets, which will then take years to grow to a size that is large enough to produce a bloom. This is why we can be so frustrated when our tulips don’t return spring after spring to bloom.
There are some types of perennial tulip bulbs that give a better chance of repeat blooms. This type is called Darwin Hybrids. Some of the Fosterianas and species (or wild) tulips will have a better chance at perennial tendencies, too. They won’t bloom forever, but you should be able to get two to three years from these types.
Of course, part of the problem in Tillamook County is our very wet winter. Providing a well-drained tulip bed will help, or you can grow them in containers that allow for good drainage. Another issue is our mild winter. Almost all tulips and spring-flowering bulbs need a cold period to grow and flower well. This makes sense since we now know what type of conditions they naturally grow in. So to provide that cold period here in our Zone 8, pre-chill your bulbs in the refrigerator from 8 to 10 weeks before planting. Which - if we count back from planting time in mid to late November - means we should be ordering those bulbs about now. I have pre-chilled Dutch iris bulbs with achieved great success. The trick is to pre-chill the bulbs and yet leave enough time in the fall to plant before the winter rains set in.
Sadly, my new catalog says that pre-chilled bulbs should not be expected to bloom for more than one spring, so they should be treated like annuals. The alternative to this, I think, would be to dig the bulbs in early summer, place them in a warm, dark, dry place until August and pre-chill them again. Granted, it is a lot of work, and I can’t guarantee, but it’s worth a try for a nice showing of tulips for two years running. This process would be easier if the tulips were planted in those containers, too.
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