Few plants evoke the joy and nostalgia associated with tulips, the quintessential spring flower with big showy blooms and a color palette broader than almost any other category of bulbs.
For many gardeners and designers, tulips are treated as a short-lived perennial or even an annual—one that requires extra planning since the bulbs must be purchased and planted in fall, leading to a show of spring color that is all too short compared to box-store annuals that bloom from May until frost.
That’s because many tulip varieties don’t perennialize well in common garden conditions. Though rugged wild populations of Tulipa gesneriana, the first tulip species dug up from the mountains of Iran and Turkey to be cultivated, are vigorous even in dry rocky soil, centuries of breeding and coddling in northwestern Europe have made them fussy. Many of these popular commercial varieties like carefully-controlled temperature treatments and soil components, resent summer rain, and in the garden they are prone to “shattering” (dividing excessively) in their second year into countless small bulbs that are each too small to bloom. The next year’s growth is mostly small spikes of foliage, and things continue to devolve from there. If that’s what growing tulips really entailed, I’d say why bother and put my focus on a different selection of plants.
But that scenario doesn’t have to be the case. The high-maintenance tulip cultivars, albeit popular, don’t need to be representative of a truly rugged and resilient genus of plants. With a little bit of discrimination and planning, tulips can be an excellent and carefree long-term investment in the garden in any region that has a cold winter and mild spring. Particularly in the semi-arid American West, tulips can be some of your most reliable and consistent low-maintenance perennials.
Tulips that return year after year: Getting your bulbs to naturalize
First, a definition. When it comes to bulbs, the word “perennialize” generally means flowers return for at least 3 to 5 years or, at best, they can return indefinitely but typically don’t increase. Since we can’t control nature, a bad year in which uncommonly destructive weather or an invasion of hungry rabbits and deer lops off the tops of the plants could permanently knock the population of perennializers down. Because it can’t return quickly, a simple perennializer will eventually have to be replenished. Meanwhile, the word “naturalize” means the plants multiply and spread like wildflowers, rebounding from almost any temporary setback.
The genus Tulipa is composed of dozens of species native to central Asia, cool mountainous parts of the Middle East, and southeastern Europe, in various climate regions that range from dry alpine to Mediterranean. In other words, tulips are native to climates that are a lot like western North America. These different climates share the presence of a cold winter, then a brief but mild spring with at least some precipitation or residual moisture from melting snow, followed by a dry summer. They often grow at high altitudes where temperatures can swing unexpectedly and snowstorms can occur well into spring. It’s why the ephemeral tulip evolved to be exceptionally tolerant of growing and blooming amidst occasional hard frosts and cold, and can emerge from the soil, grow quickly, bloom and return to dormancy within a span of two to three months before summer’s heat. Wild tulips tend to be tolerant of a broad range of climatic and cultural conditions, while domesticated tulips can be more particular, often resenting a wet summer or soil that is too rich or dense.
With that in mind, the most important step in achieving a tulip garden that naturalizes is choosing the right kinds of tulip to begin with.
For a perennial tulip garden that doesn’t need to be constantly restocked, right off the bat we have to give up on some of the most popular classes of commercialized tulips. That means to avoid building your garden out of things like towering single late tulips, showstopping double tulips, exotic fringed, viridiflora and rembrandt tulips, trumpet tulips, and the formal cup-shaped single early and triumph tulips. Sure, there are a few of these varieties contain cultivars that perennialize decently, and some might multiply well if you are fortunate enough to have the perfect soil and microclimate in some corner of your garden. But, in general, I recommend saving these short-lived varieties for an accent, planted here and there in a contrasting color for a striking standout effect that only requires a few bulbs. Meanwhile, I recommend sticking to tried and true multipliers en masse for the tulip garden’s backbone.
Fortunately, there are so many kinds of tulips in so many shapes and colors that the remaining classes—the naturalizers—give us a lot to work with.
Tulips varieties that naturalize
Greigii tulips
My favorite class of tulips are hardy Greigii tulips, with big midseason blooms, sturdy stems and interesting patterned foliage that is attractive enough to appeal even when it’s not in bloom. Some varieties of Greigii tulip are vigorous enough that a small offset bulb can grow in early spring to produce a standard-sized plant and flower that is nearly as big as one from a commercially-bought bulb. Additionally, Greigii tulips tolerate wear and tear and grazing from herbivores at a level that would be fatal to other tulip classes.
Darwin hybrids
Darwin tulips are the most popular and familiar of the classes of tulips that can multiply, and are most likely to be seen blooming in an old garden that hasn’t been restocked in a very long time. You might even see one or two of these tulips peeking out in an abandoned lot. Created by crossing vigorous fosteriana tulips with showy single late tulips, Darwin hybrids have a very “classic” and recognizable tulip shape, and bloom mid-spring. They exist somewhere along the threshold between perennializers and naturalizers—although they can multiply in many conditions and are easy to bring back year after year, they won’t usually form expansive clumps and could eventually lose the battle in a garden that becomes crowded out by more vigorous perennials or weeds. Still, in a garden that is even moderately tended, you can get them to maintain their numbers and even gradually increase your stock.
Emperor tulips
Fosteriana tulips, also known as emperor tulips, are half of the Darwin hybrids’ genetic heritage and the side that gives them their perennializing ability. Fosterianas are big and showy early-spring bloomers that flower with a peculiar hourglass-shaped bloom, and spread their petals wide on a sunny day to resemble an oriental poppy as much as a tulip. They are solid naturalizers that will multiply in most circumstances.
Kaufmaniana tulips
Kaufmaniana tulips have an un-tulip-like “waterlily” shape, spreading their petals wide to reveal striking bullseye patterns in the center of a starlike flower. On a cold or cloudy day, their tightly-closed flowers appear slender and often show different colors on the outsides. The plants are short—five to eight inches tall—exceptionally tolerant of snow and cold, and bloom the earliest of any type of tulip, sometimes even before the daffodils do.
Species tulips
Finally, there are species tulips, a class that is really a catch-all for anything left over from all other tulip categories. While the other classes are, generally, different blends of a few closely-related species within the Tulip genus, each type of species tulip is a unique species, many of which are too diverse to hybridize—so there’s more genetic diversity in this class of tulips than in all the others put together. They are sometimes referred to as “wild tulips” since most varieties were only recently brought into cultivation. This category tends to contain lots of smaller plants—some as dainty as two inches tall—and holds some of the most aggressive and resilient multipliers (although not all of them will multiply as quickly). Many of them produce multiple flowers per stem or send up successive flowers from the same bulb. They can spread through your garden not only by offsets but by seed, and are diverse and unusual enough that visitors might be surprised to learn that some of your species tulips are tulips at all.
The best sites for naturalizing tulips
With the right varieties in tow, you have a wide range of options for planting tulips to return year after year. Although tulips will generally suffer in waterlogged soil, and tend to prefer a sandy soil, naturalizers will still naturalize even in poor clay, and don’t really require fertilizer as long as mulch or compost is periodically used as a top-dressing to recycle nutrients in your garden.
A basic rule will be that tulips prefer full sun to part shade—I’d say at least 4 hours of direct sunlight per day will work if you live in a mostly cloud-free climate like New Mexico or Colorado, but 6-10 hours of direct sun with a bit of afternoon shade is ideal. In the Pacific Northwest or Eastern U.S., you should aim for at least 6 hours of direct sun.
Remember that tulips emerge and bloom in early spring before deciduous trees have leafed out, meaning that most areas in your garden, even under trees, will count as full sun until the tulip season is on the wane. Planting around trees can actually be a great benefit to your tulips because the dappled shade that develops as the trees leaf out later in the spring can protect fading tulip foliage from heat and keep it green longer. That means the plant will have a chance to grow more and bigger bulbs for next year’s blooms.
On the other hand, the South-facing side of a home, fence or building may not be a great site for tulips in sunnier regions. The problems with this setting are twofold: the heat of a southerly exposure tends to break tulips’ dormancy too early in spring, leading them to bloom when hard frosts can still nip the petals. Meanwhile, midday heat dehydrates the petals, leaving them tattered and faded and shortening the lifespan of the flower. If unseasonably warm spring weather raises the temperature past 80, full sun at midday will zap the blooms of all but the species tulips.
One place I love using for tulips is a neglected area near a sidewalk or driveway where shoveled snow gets piled over the winter. Provided that it’s not loaded with salt, tulips appreciate the winter moisture and the insulation the additional snowpack offers. When the snow melts, the soil’s water storage capacity is often great enough to get tulips through the growing season with no supplemental irrigation at all. Then the garden bed dries out in summer when the plants are dormant—conditions that tulips love. In fact, any dry, unirrigated area could be ideal for tulips, which do not lose much moisture to evaporation when temperatures are cool in spring.
Spacing
One important aspect in getting tulips to naturalize well is ensuring that the planting bed is not too dense. While drifts or clusters are always attractive ways to arrange bulbs, the clusters should be loose—the bulbs of large tulip varieties should be started out 8 to 10 inches apart (or clusters of 3-4 bulbs spaced at least a foot from the next cluster), and smaller varieties should be planted 6 inches apart (or in clusters surrounded by a wider space).
The issue is that, after a couple years, each bulb will itself have developed into a small cluster, and too much competition can stunt them. Meanwhile, you’ll find that tulips are somewhat difficult to dig and divide without unearthing the entire garden; right after they die back into dormancy the bulbs are easy to locate, but their skins are still soft and digging can easily puncture them. Later in the summer or fall they’re firm and come out easily, but it’s more likely that the dead foliage showing you where the bulb is buried has already rotted away. Although digging and dividing bulbs is a good way to keep and propagate your collection, it can be difficult to be thorough enough to get all the bulbs out if your goal is to relocate an entire planting or radically thin your stock.
Care and cultivation
Beyond the proper plant selection and planting, tulips grow best with little to no interference. That means, most importantly, leaving the foliage intact after the blooms have faded. Planting tulips in and around other flowers and perennials helps distract from the boring green foliage and reduce the temptation to clip, but this is merely aesthetic. In truth, you don’t have to do anything except occasionally replenish the mulch.
Some varieties of tulips are sterile or reluctant to go to seed, but sometimes you may see the seedpod begin to swell. Since most tulips take several years to grow from seed to flower and that’s under careful conditions, it’s appropriate to snap those off to promote energy flows down to the developing bulb, rather than up to developing seeds. The only exception I would make is for species tulips, which can sometimes go from seed to flower in 2-3 years and don’t seem to loose much momentum by making seed. Still, I like to remove all but a few pods if I have the time, just to give those bulbs and their offsets a little more oomph.
And that’s it. With a little investment upfront, you can create a dramatic and colorful spring garden of tulips, rewarding you, your neighbors and populations of pollinators for years or decades to come.
Summary:
- Perennializing tulips bloom for years to come, but may eventually dwindle. Naturalizing tulips multiply and spread.
- You can create a permanent, naturalizing tulip garden by choosing varieties that return and multiply. Species tulips, greigii tulips, fosteriana tulips, Darwin tulips and kaufmaniana tulips are most likely to naturalize.
- To naturalize well, tulips prefer well-drained soil in dryish areas that receive part sun or full sun in early spring. A spot under a deciduous tree that doesn’t leaf out until tulips are done blooming might be an ideal garden.
- To naturalize tulips, plant them in drifts spaced farther apart than the label usually calls for, so that the plants don’t compete with each other and have room to multiply.
- Don’t trim or mow foliage after tulips are done blooming. Let bulbs recharge for next year’s blooms by leaving the leaves intact until they die on their own.
- On larger tulips, cut off the seed pods after the blooms fade to direct the plant’s energy to next year’s bulbs. Small species tulips may be aggressive enough to spread and multiply by seed and by offsets at the same time.