Tulips In The Garden And Other Landscape Color
The bulbs we plant in fall are uninteresting looking objects
, but they hold beneath their dull exterior the promise of great beauty next spring. Tulips are probably the most popular and widely used of all bulbs. A better understanding of the kinds of tulips available and their particular place in the landscape will give the home gardener a longer succession of bloom and an opportunity to plan for better arrangement of size and color.
Perhaps we are least familiar with the species tulips. They are, for the most part, shorter, smaller and earlier to flower than the better known tulips. To my mind, at least, they are the only tulips suitable for naturalizing. They flower with early bulbs such as grape hyacinths (muscari), guinea hen flowers (Fritillaria meleagris), and narcissus. Like all the early-flowering plants they are particularly welcome because they bring a foretaste of the beauty that is still to come.
Dainty Tulipa kaufmanniana and its hybrids come mostly in pink, white and carmine. Some of them seem to me too short of stem in proportion to the cup shaped flower.
Tulips fosteriana and T. eichleri are bright vermilion and scarlet; T. praestans comes in orange, scarlet or vermilion, usually with several graceful flowers on a stem. These three kinds, mixed together and accompanied by grape hyacinths or pale Barri and poet's narcissus, make a brilliant group for early spring planting as the even dance at night with the
solar landscape lights.
The Kaufmanniana hybrids and the small candy-striped T. clusiana are dainty in effect and best planted close to a house door or a path under Magnolia stellata, near Viburnum carlesi or other pink or white flowering shrubs of early spring. A conversation piece near walk is a late species, T. viridiflora, which is pale green with waved petals. ft is particularly graceful in form and the strangeness of the color always causes comment.
Tulipa sylvestris is a graceful, fragrant flower in pale yellow, good with primroses and grape hyacinths. Most of the species tulips increase from year to year and should be left undisturbed until they begin to form oversized colonies. They belong in rock gardens, naturalized under shrubs or occasionally in the garden around late-blooming perLennials or die-back shrubs such as abelia, vitex or buddleia.
For general garden use the tulip season starts with a too-little-known type, the Triumph tulip. This is a cross between the single early and the Darwin tulip; it has the shape of the Darwins but flowers about two weeks earlier. Around New York or in sections of the country with similar conditions, the single or double early tulips are likely to be frostbitten and are therefore not too valuable in these areas. The Triumph, on the other hand, comes into flower at a time when narcissus is fading and before the big tulips have begun to bloom.
The list of Triumphs is increasing every year as gardeners become more familiar with them. In the flower garden or flower border, Triumph tulips along the front edge of the bed with the Breeder, Cottage and Darwin varieties behind them, give a succession of tulip bloom for three or four weeks instead of the two weeks which would be possible from only one of these groups. They frequently overlap the season of the later tulips, so that the color schemes must be worked out carefully.
The main show of May in any flower garden is provided by the Cottage, Darwin and Breeder tulips. For landscape purposes, they are completely interchangeable and the catalogues which list them together are much easier to manage. The color range is so wide that any scheme is possible. Breeder tulips for the most part come in yellow, copper, bronze and purple varieties with a brown or yellow overlay on almost all shades. All the Breeder tulips blend with each other in the same way as the familiar annual salpiglossis which blooms in midsummer.
The Breeder tulips are also excellent with the yellows, oranges and clear purples of the Cottage and Darwin tulips, but they are too brilliant for most of the pinks and reds. The Cottage tulips are for the most part delicate in color but only the specialist can differentiate between Darwin and Cottage tulips for garden use.
Among the Cottage tulips there are several fine varieties from 20 to 24 inches high which are particularly good in small gardens. Darwins have more range of height, form and color. May-flowering tulips may be used in mixed groups of pale yellow, pink lavender and a dark variety or they may be ranged from white to very dark shades in the length of the border - each variety being used in a separate group.
All tulips are outstandingly fine cutting flowers. but two kinds are better for cutting than for general garden display - the late double, or peony-flowered. and the exotic Parrot tulips. To many people, any double tulip is an anathema. as the purity of the single form is too rare in the flower world. The peony-flowered tulips are heavy-headed and need staking in windy locations.
Parrot tulips, with their bizarre, feathered petals and unusual color-striping, are startling. They are still inclined to be too weak-stemmed - for their huge blossoms and are best planted primarily for cutting. If they are used in a garden, they should never be inter-planted with the tulips of conventional form but should be used in small isolated groups as conversation pieces or accents.
by: Keith Markensen.
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