Tips For Choosing And Planting Tulips

Tulips are my favourites of all the spring-flowering bulbs. I think it's their combination of childishness and formality that I find so appealing. Tulips bloom in an astonishing range of balloon-bright colours, and many are gaudy enough to please anyone's child-like delight in bright colours and bold shapes. But on the other hand, their form is so architecturally perfect that a blooming tulip seems almost surreal.

I find this contradiction so pleasing that I have about 500 tulips in my back yard, and persist in adding more each year. Spring is truly dazzling when it arrives in my garden! (You can see a few of my many tulips on this page of my "Stevie-Ray's Garden" Web site.)

But you don't have to have as many tulips as I have to create a spectacular display in your garden. All you have to do is follow some simple rules.

1. Don't be stingy; think in double digits. Once you've decided what kind(s) of tulips you want, make sure you buy enough of them to create an effect. Remember that most tulip bulbs will produce a single flower. A stand of 5 tulips looks pathetic, not pleasing. A group of 50 tulips is eye-catching!

2. Never plant less than 20 tulips of one kind together. When I say kind, I'm referring to the Tulipa divisions, such as the Darwin Hybrid group, the Parrot group, or the Rembrandt group. There are 15 division in all, and the tulips of each division have different bloom shapes, heights, and blooming times. You should plant tulips of one kind together because not all divisions of tulips look good next to each other, and planting groups of tulips with the same bloom shape will give your beds unity. If you are buying and planting 100 tulips or fewer, choose no more than 2 kinds of tulips. Almost all the tulips in my back yard, for instance, are Triumphs or Darwin Hybrids.

3. Pay close attention to the bloom times of the tulips you choose. You need to decide whether you want your tulips to bloom successively, or all at once. Keep your plan simple for the best display. For example, choose tulips for one bed that will bloom in early spring, and for another bed tulips that will bloom in mid-spring, if you choose to have them bloom successively. Only use succession planting in a single bed if the bed contains a hundred or more tulips. Otherwise, your display will look disappointingly spotty. In my own case, I've chosen to have all my tulips bloom in mid or late spring, a surefire way to get the effect of my entire yard "bursting" into bloom.

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