I’ve always claimed the one section of my garden that is truly xeric doesn’t really reach its color peak until summer, when heat-lovers such as fernbush, pale coneflower, butterflyweed, leadplant, desert four o’clock, pineleaf penstemon and blue sage create a riot of color.
But that’s not entirely fair or accurate. In April and May, hundreds of colorful tulips carpet this spot.
These are the species tulips, sometimes called botanical tulips, which are so ideally suited to the Front Range of Colorado that they require no care whatsoever to grow into large colonies.
Unlike the hybrid florist’s tulips that were developed in Holland to withstand Europe’s damp and misty climate, the species tulips’ love of heat and summer drought reveals their arid and semi-arid origins. They hail from Central Asia, places associated with nomads and camels, not windmills and wooden clogs.
All species tulips require is plenty of sunshine, rapidly draining soil, some moisture while leaves and flowers are up and about and dry soil in summer. This makes them perfect season extenders for xeric gardens. When happy, a dozen bulbs will naturalize by seed, natural division or stolons into hundreds within a few years.
The first to appear, usually by mid- April, is Tulipa humilis Eastern Star, a hot pink six-pointed star with an egg- yolk-golden center. With leaves only 6 inches tall, the flowers are proportionally small, hence its common name, crocus tulip. Ten bulbs planted in 1997 have increased more than tenfold. T. humilis is available in a variety of other colors in shades of pink, purple, fuchsia, lavender, rose and true red.
Also debuting in mid-April is Tulipa praestens Unicum, called firespray tulips for their flaming scarlet flowers, with petals held in a cup shape, five flowers per stem. This selection has the added bonus of handsome silver-gray foliage edged in creamy white. This is one tulip that is equally attractive in and out of bloom.
Canary-yellow Tulipa tarda, with its white-tipped petals and yellow anthers, completes this mid-April trio. I curse this tulip in other parts of my garden where it smothers less vigorous companions (one bulb merchant describes it as “almost a groundcover”), but these reliable, prolific flowers are indispensable in the unwatered garden.
I was shocked when an English bulb expert told me they grow this “precious” bulb in pots. (He was equally shocked when I told him I had thousands in my garden and that he’d be welcome to dig some up!)
May generally belongs to the large florist-type tulips, but in this part of the garden, they don’t persist. Instead, armies of Tulipa bakeri Lilac Wonder bivouac beneath a bigtooth maple, their leaves yet to unfurl for the new season. Delicate lavender and gold stars belie this tulip’s robust constitution.
None of these tulips is available now, so unless you know someone who is willing to share bulbs, you have no choice but to wait until later this year to get them in the ground. If you can’t find them at a local nursery, try Brent and Becky’s Bulbs (brentandbeckysbulbs.com or 877-661-2852).
Marcia Tatroe’s most recent book is “Cutting Edge Gardening in the Intermountain West” ($29.95, Johnson Books). E-mail her at mtatroe@q.com.
