Category — Bulbs

For years, I’ve been drooling over descriptions of this flower: it’s a bulb, it’s fragrant, it blooms in the middle of hot summer: what more could I want?

I did try it once. Reading somewhere that it was drought-tolerant, I got three bulbs and planted them in one of my containers. Results: nothing.

I still wanted to try again.

Yet somehow, year after year, I kept cutting it off my list. Next year, I’d say to myself. Next year I’ll have it. And year after year, I kept reading and seeing pictures of all the beautiful species as well as the hybrid cultivated forms (Scott Ogdens’s book, Garden Bulbs for the South, was the catalyst for many of my fantasies).

Last fall I finally ordered them again. Bowing to my climate and budget, I picked one of the best-known, easiest-grown, and easiest-to-find cultivars. Hymenocallis festalis is hardy to zone 8, where I live. The graceful, elegant, desirable species I saw were from Mexico, and hardy only to zone 9 or 10. I’d been down that road before. I chose the road most traveled by: I ordered a plant I knew would survive in my climate.

As usual, I had to work at finding places to stash all my fall-planted bulbs, and I’d forgotten not only where I’d put them, but that I had them. So when these strange fat light-green amaryllis-like stems started emerging from the large container with the Goodwin Creek lavender and Berggarten sage, I didn’t know what they were.

Until the day one opened. For a minute, when I saw it, I thought: what’s that white trumpet lily doing on such a short stalk? My hymenocallis is shorter on its stalk than the picture, only about eight inches tall; that’s usually caused by late planting. Since I didn’t keep records of when I planted last year (bad, I know), I’m not sure if planting late was the cause this time.

I happened to pick up Two Gardens, letters of Elizabeth Lawrence and K.S. White, while I was mulling this over. In one of the letters, Elizabeth Lawrence points out that hot-freeze-hot can create short bulb stems. We certainly had that this spring – and summer.

I’m also wondering if they came up this time because of a mistake I made. I got distracted watering one day, and I left the hose on that big container with the lavender and sage (and Hymenocallis).

Some hymenocallis like a boggy situation (I saw some in a greenhouse that were growing in water);

others prefer light watering and good drainage. Hymenocallis festalis is the light-water type according to most of my sources (including Select Seeds, where I bought them). But it’s interesting that I got the hymenocallis sprouts right after I gave that pot a good soaking.

Gaygardener says that H. festalis multiplies better if it’s kept moist all the time. I might test that out at some point, but our water table is low from drought, and I’m not going to make my lavender/sage pot into a bog anytime soon

In any case, in the obliging way of bulbs, it’s opened. The fragrance is of the orangeblossom/gardenia/ tribe, but somehow diluted and softened in a very pleasing way.

Hymenocallis X festalis is a cross of the Mexican H. narcissiflora with H. longipetala. (Maybe those are some species hymenocallis I could grow, if I could locate them. Or maybe not.) Hymenocallis is in the Amaryllis family, which is why its emerging stems reminded me so much of amaryllis. Daffodils are in the same family, as you can tell by hymenocallis’s looks, and one of its common names.

As for the Latin name, “Hymenocallis” means “beautiful membrane”, and refers to the flower’s corona. The “festalis” part of the name means, as you might have guessed, festival or holiday. So it’s a beautiful festive membrane. (I do think the curling-back petals of hymenocallis look like some party decoration.)

Someday, maybe I’ll find a way to grow some of the species hymenocallis. Meanwhile, I’m happy to finally celebrate my little Hymenocallis festival.

In times of stressed economy, it’s good to do what we can to save money.

Since I’ve been poor and cheap for decades, I’m well-prepared to inform those who are experiencing this for the first time. I have been working for years, very unscientifically, on getting my tulips to return, instead of buying them every year, as is our extravagant custom.

These Prinses Irene tulips returned year after year – until I made the mistake of digging them up

And then what do you do with tulip bulbs at the end of the year? Tossing them out makes me feel somewhat as I did in fourth grade, when the egg incubator failed in science class, and I had to pour a half-formed chicken down the drain (There seems to be a lot of trauma around science, here. Maybe this is the key to my unscientificness (lack of scientificity?).)

Keeping bulbs around seems to indicate that I should do something to help them survive. So I started looking for ways to do that.

Some of my ideas for getting tulips to return came from the folks at Old House Gardens, who have their own tip sheet for helping tulips come back. Others came from Janis Ruksans, who has been collecting, propagating, and breeding bulbs for decades. Brent and Becky’s gave me the good soil tip (which I ignored for many years). Still others are a combination of my own observation, research, and guesswork.

While I haven’t come up with the Definitive Home Method getting tulips to return, I have come up with a lot of things that will up your chances. Don’t be depressed by the length of the list; I don’t do all of the things on it, either. Bulbs are forgiving. Just taking heed of pointer #1 will give you ever-increasing returns on your tulips. Even in these hard times.

1. Buy the right varieties of tulip.

Older tulips were bred for gardeners. Newer ones (after about 1950) are bred for the cut-flower industry, which is more interested in instant results than lasting glory. But the category of tulip matters, too. Fosterianas, kauffmanias, greggis, and most so-called “species” tulips (they aren’t always) tend to repeat easily and reliably in the garden. Among these categories, some are more long-lasting than others. ‘Purissima’, ‘Sweetheart’, ‘Lady Jane’ and T. batalinii ‘Apricot Jewel’ have done well for me. (In an earlier post  I went into this in more detail.)

2. Leave tulip foliage on until it’s dead, dead, dead. And don’t tie it up, either.

For some reason, there’s a gardening tradition of cutting bulb foliage when it starts to go yellow. To me, this neatness smacks of overzealous housekeeping, but you don’t have to militate against tidiness to see that cutting foliage has a very bad effect on bulbs. Tying up foliage, often cited as an alternative, is equally bad; those leaves need sun. Which leads us to the next point.

3. Give tulips enough sun.

I learned this one the hard way. Sunlight on the foliage is what feeds it. And since the foliage feeds the bulb and the bulb makes the flower….this is starting to sound like a folk song, but you get the picture. My semi-shady garden has made me very aware that the more sun you give tulips, the better they return. Frances at Fairegarden  illustrates this with a story about her own tulips.

4. Don’t give tulips too much sun.

I learned this one the hard way, too. Hot weather can strike suddenly in spring, blasting tulip buds to tiny brown shriveled things, yellowing foliage before its time. Since the leaves make next year’s bulbs (this is beginning to be my theme song), foliage dead before its time usually means blind bulbs next spring.

5. Foliar feed tulips throughout the growing season.

I’ve been doing this for the last year for my tulips, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that suddenly, this year, I’m seeing blooms from several kinds of tulips I’ve had “incubating” for years as small bulbs in small pots. Janis Ruksans says that using foliar feed has vastly improved things in his bulb nursery, so I’m in good company. I use an organic foliar feed that promotes bloom, and I try to get it on my tulip foliage every two weeks until the leaves are gone. Every week would be better.

6. Calcium is great for tulips – as a foliar feed and in the ground.

Earlier, I posted my discovery  that Janis Ruksans, bulb hunter, propagator, and breeder, found that his small offset bulbs did far better when they were planted in rocky soil. Since he’s an experienced bulb worker, he had good drainage both places. The difference, in his opinion, was calcium. And, I think, probably other minerals. Photos of species bulbs show them in the rocky landscapes which create high-mineral soils. This is a clue to what bulbs need.

7. Ground feed tulips in fall and early spring.

Besides fertilizing with minerals spring and fall, I use an organic high-phosphorus fertilizer to give bulbs a boost. Fall fertilizing feeds bulbs as they wake from dormancy and start to send roots into the ground, seeking food; spring fertilizing (at least this is my theory) gives the foliage something extra to draw on as it feeds the bulbs for the following year. (Actually, I read up on some Experts, and found that they also believe in spring and fall fertilizing. Very gratifying.) In my own area, both feedings take advantage of seasonal rains to wash fertilizers into the soil, saving energy (mine) and water.

8. Split up tulip offsets and give them room to grow (separately).

Bulbs which are squashed together don’t have room to develop into maturity. They compete for turf and nutrients, like rats in a cage, and fail to thrive. If you’re getting a lot of blind bulbs, or the leaves are looking smaller and smaller, you need to dig them up when they’re dormant, split them apart, and give them living room. I generally use small pots for this, so I don’t lose track of tiny bulbs.

These are the small leaves that show when your bulbs are too small to bloom. They’ve been split up into pots to grow out.

9. Don’t water tulips in summer.

Unlike many plants, tulips loathe water. They rot. They sulk. They don’t reproduce. This makes tulips the ultimate low-water plant, since water is at its most precious in hot weather. If you plant tulips in pots, shelter those pots from rain until it’s time to fertilize in fall. If you plant in the ground, put tulips in low-water areas with herbs and succulents. (For more detailed info on this, check out Old House Gardens instructions on keeping bulbs going.)

10. Don’t put tulips where they will have saturated, moist soil at any time – they rot.

This is a continuation of the previous point, but it bears saying. I once put some tulips in a spot where they would receive maximum winter water (under an overhanging roof where the rain ran like a little spout). I thought this would nourish them to a fine future. What it actually did was turn them to mush. Tulips may benefit from a little water during an early-spring hot spell, but they need drainage drainage drainage, all year round. (The one exception to this might be Tulipa sylvestris, but my jury’s still out on that.)

11. Plant them deeper.

Two reliable sources said 8 inches to a foot. Do be sure that there is plenty of nutritious and amended soil under the bulb, no matter how deep you plant it; it still needs to get nourishent through its roots, not its top. And remember that tulips need drainage. Since I plant in pots, I compromise at about 8 inches. Sylvia from England writes that she has been experimenting with this; she planted her West Points a foot deep, and promises to report on the results.

12. Use good soil.

One of my antique garden books says that tulips need good soil, but not rich soil. That’s what Brent and Becky’s advises, too (it used to be in their print catalogue, but I didn’t find it online). Most tulips originally come from rocky mountain soils, so obviously they can grow in poor soils as long as mineral content is high. Like many plants, though, even species tulips enjoy a loose soil with easily-available nutrients. The big flashy ones bred in the light, sandy soils of the Netherlands may sometimes survive in hard or poor soils, but they don’t thrive there.

13. Deadhead.

Once they bloom, plants put all their energy into making seeds. They want the next generation to survive. If you want the foliage to feed your bulbs and future flowers more than the seeds, pick the green seedpods off as soon as flowering is done. If you have lots of tulips, you might be able to bribe some kids into doing it for something good to eat.

Maybe you’ve had experiences that refute these pointers. Maybe you want to exand on the ideas I’ve listed. Maybe you know of some tulips that seem to come back more easily than others, or even better, you’ve come up with yet another way to get tulips to return. Won’t you share the knowledge? And if you’ve got more questions about this (I sure do), maybe we can all put our heads together and discuss it.

Insulinde is a broken tulip – a modern version of the tulips which brought many a person to financial ruin, and caused a breeding frenzy in the Netherlands which was probably the beginning of its tulip industry today.

The story of broken tulips could (and does) take up entire books. These were the ones which caused the famous Tulipomania, the huge run on tulip stock that had Hollanders trading horses and wagons, houses and breweries, for a single bulb. Poorer people bought shares of tulip futures in pubs that catered to the tulip stock market.

No one knew what made some of the tulips break. Since the broken ones were the most valuable and desirable, everyone tried whatever they could to get their tulips to break. Pigeon dung, secret spells, burying bulbs at midnight under a fruit tree.

Because they were so valuable, broken tulips acquired their own market-driven categories, separate from and superior to the others. There were Rosen, red or pink tulips with a white ground; Violetten, purple or lilac on white; and Bizarden: red, purple, or brown on yellow. In the nineteenth century, when a lot of botanical nomenclature was becoming more like the modern type we know, broken tulips still had their own peculiar classification; the only difference was that the former Violetten were now called Byblomen.

By the turn of the twentieth century, when Rev. Joseph Jacobs (a man after my own heart) was stuffing five hundred types of tulips in his rectory garden, people were beginning to suspect that breaking was caused by some sort of disease. Some breeders began trying to eliminate broken tulips from their stock, because broken tulips were smaller and more sickly and made the rest of the stock the same way. Writing in 1912, Jacob describes a letter from E. Gadeceau, a grower in Nantes. M. Gadeceau said he was more and more convinced that broken tulips were “like degenerate or sick Darwins, as it pleases you” (my translation).

He was right. Breaking is caused by a virus carried by the peach potato aphid, which thrives in warm situations surrounded by fruit trees. Turns out those people burying their bulbs at midnight under a fruit tree were right,  too.

While Jacob called broken tulips Rembrandts, he didn’t mean what catalogues mean today when they talk of Rembrandt tulips. What we call Rembrandts now are the thickly streaked ones like Marilyn, World Impresion, Prinses Irene, and others. While fetching, they don’t have anything like the intricacy that true broken tulips have. One of the names Jacob used for broken tulips reflects how they were valued: “rectified” tulips.

Jacob had yet another category to add to the list of broken tulips: Florist’s tulips, often called English tulips today. These tulips were a subset of broken tulips which had been taken over by English breeders, and given a very strict set of standards. (England was awash in plant-breeding societies in the 1800s. Many of the members were working people who bred amazing primroses, roses, tulips, and other plants in their time off . Many of these societies still exist, including the one for English tulips.) Not unnaturally, Jacob considers these the finest of all tulips, better than the Rembrandts, and when you look at pictures of them – well, you can make a case for it.

Insulinde, like most broken tulips, is smaller than the modern tulips we are used to . The first flowering of my bulb was a bloom about the size of a medium egg, and the stem was  less than a foot high (about a third of a meter).

Broken tulips aren’t cheap – the ones I’ve bought have been about $15 to $20 for one bulb – and they aren’t easy (they are diseased, after all). They are especially susceptible to what’s going around, and since they are small, I have found them to be some of the first candidates for burning up and drying out in a heat wave. You also need to plant them separately, so other tulips won’t get diseased. I put mine in small, deep pots. This way you can also be sure to get them out of the way of summer water, which is so damaging to tulips.

So if broken tulips are this much trouble, why bother with them? Because they are so amazing. When you look at one side of a broken tulip, the pattern is subtly different from the other side.

When Insulinde first bloomed, I had never seen anything in the plant world like the loops and whorls and dark and light patches and the faint hints of other colors that decorated this tulip and changed each day. I began to understand how people could become obsessed with such tulips. (Well, it wasn’t a very long step for me, was it?)

The following year, I had a smaller bloom from Insulinde, and then my tulip split into offsets and went blind. I have four small bulbs now, and this year I got another, smaller bloom, about the size of a walnut in its shell. It has the same amazing patterning of the first, with variations. I’m looking forward to seeing all of those little offsets grow out. And I can’t help thinking that it would be interesting to try putting them in with other tulips, to see if I can create my own degenerate Darwins.
(For more on antique tulips, visit the English tulips pictures link above, or check out Hortus Bulborum, the place Old House Gardens (where I got Insulinde) calls “the Noah’s Ark of bulbs.”)

At last, a real species tulip.

Ah, but which species? We’ll leave the botanical brangling until later. First, a description.

This is the smallest tulip in this series. It doesn’t just come up to your ankle; it comes up to your ankle bone.

It’s the earliest tulip, too. In full bloom by mid-March, even the first year of planting, it’s ahead of some of my narcissus. It’s a native of Central Asia, where it blooms on rocky mountain slopes, by streams, and on rock ledges. By which you can guess that it’s a tough customer for soil as well as weather.

As you can see, the bees love it; they really have to look for those early flowers. And I loved the way it folded up at night: the tight buds looked just as they did before they’d opened.

After it had faded, I read that T. turkestanica has an unpleasant scent. As you can see, I got pretty close to them in order to take the bee picture; I didn’t smell anything. On the other hand, scent’s a chancy thing, and I didn’t bury my nose in them to check.

I planted these tulips in a container with later, bigger ones. The combination worked well; small early tulips bloom and die off while the bigger-tulip foliage covers them up with new green. This is a lot better than those combination plantings where the small bulb blooms last, amidst crackly sere foliage. (That would be a poetic way of saying dead.)

Now for the Department of Botanical Brangling. This tulip is, certainly, a tulip that is found in the wild, in this form as well as similar others. (Bulbs often vary in the wild, and tulips, as we know, are deeply given to variations.)

Anna Pavord says that T. turkestanica has a horrible smell, while T. biflorifomis, a look-alike species, has a faint odor of honey. Implying that they are two distinct species. She does mention some variations in turkestanica types she looked at: some with broad leaves, others with narrow.

Janis Ruksans collected some of these bulbs in the Turkestan mountains. He refers to this tulip throughout his book as the T. bifloriformis/T. turkestanica complex, and says that a lot of work still has to be done to make out the real difference between the two.

Anna Pavord has done her research, not only on paper but going out in the field. Janis Ruksans has spent decades not only collecting plants in the field and noting their slight differences from habitat to habitat, but then growing and propagating them in his nursery, where he has opportunity to see them up close and personal. He’s definitely not a lumper by nature, as his book and catalogue descriptions detail the different subspecies with minute precision.

So I’m going with Ruksans, although I mean no disrespect to Pavord. As far as I can see from here, he has access to more primary-source information, and he’s not talking through his hat. (Wherever did that expression come from?) I’m not going for the T. turkestanica/T. bifloriformus  judgement to the extent of retitling this post, though. Life is too short.

Do any of you have an opinion on this?

Whatever their exact botanical designation, these tulips have been blooming for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. They have been in commerce so long that the nursery-grown versions are quite cheap. (I hope all of you are checking to be sure that you never buy wild-collected bulbs. It decimates the populations when they are collected in bulk, instead of carefully selected for propagation.)

If you want quick, early color and cheer from a tulip tiny enough to grace your windowsill, give this species – whatever that is – a try.

References:

Anna Pavord, The Tulip, Bloomsbury, 1999

Janis Ruksans, Buried Treasures, Timber Press, 2007

What color is this tulip?

That’s what I asked an artist friend came to visit while this tulip was in bloom.  After she had spent some pensive moments contemplating it, I said, unable to keep quiet, “To me, it looks like a sort of rosy coral.” She allowed as how she thought that was a pretty good description. It’s an unusual color.

Brent and Becky’s, my source for Van Eijk, gives it a very poetic color description  “a wonderful combination of beetroot purple and turkey red with a primrose base.” Their picture makes a good case for this claim, too, but it sure wasn’t the color my Van Eijks came out.

And then imagine my surprise when, researching this artilce, I found that Tulipworld claims that Van Eijk is pale pink. My tulips weren’t anywhere near pale; the tulips on the Tulipworld site have the deep coral-rose of my van Eijks only on their edges – but the picture looks as if it is of just-opening tulips, whose colors are often different from the mature versions.

You can see the pale petal middles as this Van Eijk opens.

Different soils can definitely alter the color of a tulip. I can see that that might solve the problem with the difference between my Van Eijks and Brent and Becky’s, but I think the Tulipworld picture is just strange. I could be wrong. It’s happened before.

A little earlier than the previous picture – color still coming in.

Whatever its color, Van Eijk is certainly remarkable. It was probably the most-commented-on tulip in my garden this spring. Not that I have busloads of tourists coming in, but I do have a lot of tulips. This color got attention.

I think Van Eijk must be a fairly new tulip, because there’s so little about it in the literature. I haven’t been able to get a date on it, though. (Does anybody have a good source for this? Breeding information on modern tulips?)

What I can tell you about this tulip is how it grows. Van Eijk (pronounce it the second part of the name like “Ike” and you’ll be close) is a mid-spring bloomer. It’s a Darwin hybrid: a cross between an early Fosteriana (like Exotic Emperor and Sweetheart) and tulips from the strong but mysterious Darwin group. This spring was a little hard on all my tulips, so the fact that Van Eijk lasted only about two weeks shouldn’t put you off.  The flowers were very stable and took a long time to look crepey or drop petals.

All sources that sell it cite the incredible robust hardiness of this tulip – and indeed, it stood straight and tall (about 2 feet or 2/3 of a meter) and kept its blooms in fine fettle in weather from snow to the eighties (27 degrees and up C). (I told you this spring was hard on tulips. They didn’t care for the heat.) The other few gardener reviews I could find on Van Eijk rated it highly for vigor and longlasting flowers.

Brent and Becky’s counts it as “the longest term” perennial group of tulips. “Perennial” tulips, it turns out, are only kind of semi-perennial: they get called that if they come back for a few years or so. Van Eijk is e also listed as being suited from zones 3 to 9, an unusually high zone for tulips, which usually need a more serious freeze than zone 9 gets (even some parts of zone 8 can have problems with tulips).

I trust Brent and Becky because they raise and breed bulbs, and make frequent visits to growers in the Netherlands where they can see breeders’ work in the field. They’re not just pulling numbers out of a hat. So all you zone 9 folks who’ve longed for the big flashy tulips that usually won’t grow in your area – here’s your chance.

There’s only one question left: what color is this tulip?

(If you’re interested in checking out even more tulips, try “The Bees Knees of Tulips” -  – Bruce Zimmerman’s picks for most fragrant, best double, and a few other categories.)