“The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.”by Robert Burns

This quote couldn’t be more fitting for me today. Some of you may remember the post I wrote back at the end of September entitled “To Bouquet or not to Bouquet” in which I described two different methods of planting. In this post, I included photos from my own planting expedition in my front yard. I planted over 300 bulbs that day of a variety of types, heights, and colors and boy was I proud of myself!

After a long afternoon of dirt and dust, digging and “troweling”, I rewarded myself to an evening of laying on the floor, playing with my girls and resting my tired muscles, all the time well-aware of the fact that I still had a bucket of bulbs sitting on the back steps waiting to be planted. This bucket of bulbs included a mixture of muscari and scilla, a beautiful combination which I intended to plant in a layer above the more deeply-planted tulip bulbs. As I lay there on the floor with crumbs of Goldfish crackers in my hair, I promised myself I would get the rest of those bulbs planted within the next day or two.

Unfortunately, life got in the way and days turned to weeks and weeks to months. It is now the beginning (almost middle, eek!) of December and I have yet to revisit my landscape. While filling the bird feeder the other day, I happened upon that bucket of beautiful bulbs and noticed something different about them: not ONE SCILLA bulb remained! The gorgeous blue-purple outer covering lay in shards all over the porch steps but hardly any resemblance of  anything “plantable”.

It’s no mystery what caused the disappearance of my scilla bulbs. We have more squirrels than you can shake a stick at in my yard (and believe me, I do!) and while they provide endless entertainment for my 17-month old daughters, I would prefer they not mess with my gardening expeditions. All of this time, I’ve known scilla to be deer resistant, which I simply assumed meant rodent resistant, too. Apparently not MY rodents. The good news is, they left the muscari completely untouched! Smart little buggers…I guess I can’t be too mad at them. After all, if I had just gotten myself back out in the dirt as I had originally intended, they might have lived to see another day. Instead, I practically spread a tablecloth on the back porch steps and lit dinner candles for them to enjoy.

So the moral of this story is two-fold. Number one: rodents eat scilla. No doubt about it. Number two: my new take on the above-mentioned quote is “The best laid plans of men often go astray because of squirrels.”

With hands in the dirt and head in the clouds,

“Last year my tulips were just beautiful and had countless blooms…this year I can count how many I have on both hands. What happened?”

Spring Song Darwin Hybrid Tulip

I have heard countless comments similar to the one above from fellow gardeners. And rightly so! Everyone knows tulips are supposed to be one of the easiest plants to grow and you can just put them in the ground and enjoy their blooms for many springs to come, right?? Or perhaps not…

Many people, when asking about the lack of flowers they are experiencing from their tulips, wonder if they are doing something wrong: did they not plant them deep enough? Are the bulbs overcrowded? Was the foliage removed too early from the year before? Unfortunately, the lack of blooms in the second, third, and fourth years are often a result of nothing the gardener could’ve prevented.

Little Beauty Botanical Tulips

If tulips are planted during the fall in proper conditions (receiving adequate amounts of water and sunlight and a long enough chilling period during the winter), they will most likely sprout, grow, and bloom in a vibrant display the following spring. Whether or not they return with as much vigor and brilliance in following years has more to do with the variety of tulip than the planting technique. Botanical (or species) tulips along with their hybridized cousins (specifically Darwin Hybrids) are the most reliable tulips for perennializing (returning year after year). These tulip bulbs perform wonderfully in the spring and in most cases, even naturalize (produce more bulbs causing them to spread).

You may now be wondering about the advice you’ve heard that recommends lifting your tulip bulbs and replanting them to encourage more blooms. While this can sometimes help to achieve the desired effect if the problem is indeed overcrowding, it is not a reliable solution and is, in my opinion, a lot of work for something that will only yield humdrum results. Therefore, save yourself some trouble and plant varieties of tulips that are known for perennializing. If you want to grow some of the other types, go right ahead! Just don’t be surprised if you end up replacing them every couple of years.

Until next time,

]]> http://bulbblog.com/returning-tulips/feed/ 1 http://bulbblog.com/photographing-with-flowers/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=photographing-with-flowers http://bulbblog.com/photographing-with-flowers/#comments Sun, 17 May 2009 19:19:40 +0000 Bridget http://www.bulbblog.com/?p=578 HEY! That’s MY yard!

Our breezeway entrance, beginning to show life this spring!

My husband and I are relatively new in our neighborhood and have not yet had a chance to get acquainted with our neighbors. When we first moved into our house at the end of last fall, the landscape was quite stark, like a blank canvas just waiting for the artist’s touch. In the small amount of time I had before the snow fell,  I planted over 150 daffodil and tulip bulbs in the front yard. So you can imagine how thrilled I was this spring when the foliage began peeking out of the soil and continued to produce beautiful blooms. Did I mention that I also realized not one other house on our street had a yard as beautiful as ours???

Ever since the first sign of growth, my husband and I have been “charting” the plants’ progress. In fact, one day he said to me, “Bridget, I swear that I can actually see those tulips growing taller–they seem to be growing so fast!” It made me happy to have my husband as excited as I was at the success of the spring blooming bulbs I had planted.

The beginning of spring in the front of our house!

For a few weeks now, we’ve enjoyed the tulip and daffodil blooms and have made notes of which ones bloomed first, second, third, and so on. It is always interesting to me to observe how a garden can “evolve” over the course of a month or two while one plant finishes flowering and the next one takes over. And as it turns out, I wasn’t the only one admiring my spring blooms…

The tulips and daffodils brightening the walkway to our breezeway entrance.

This past weekend, I was dusting our living room (one of the worst house chores there is) and I happened to glance out our front bay window. I did a double take as I realized a young teenage couple, dressed to the nines standing in front of my flowerbed! As I took in the situation, I also noticed a corsage and boutineer, complete with a proud mother snapping photographs of the “prom-ready” couple! At first I couldn’t help but think, “The nerve! This is MY yard and these are MY flowers!” But just as I was about to run out into my front yard waving a baseball bat, I suddenly felt flattered. These neighbors of mine, whom I had never met before, had thought enough of MY flowers to want them in their picture! What better compliment could a gardener receive?!

The front flowerbed near to full bloom...and also the backdrop to a couple's pre-prom photograph

Now I’m not certain that I would ever have the guts to pose for a picture five feet in front of a house owned by someone I had never met, but the experience definitely made me feel good. After all, do we not plant flowers to beautify our surroundings? I like to think that my little piece of the earth makes it a nicer place to live. And for this young prom couple, it made a beautiful picture which will be viewed in photo albums long after the flowers fade.

Until next time,

Have a question about which bulbs are the most photogenic or any other gardening topic? Ask Bridget! Email her at bridget@bulbblog.com! If she features your question in a future post, you’ll receive a Holland Bulb Farms coupon for your next order with Holland Bulb Farms!