HOW TO GROW TULIPS IN THE SOUTH

Tulips are considered a rarity in southern states but they needn’t be. With some planning and a little refrigerator room, tulips will brighten southern early spring gardens just as completely as in the Northland.

Two things account for large tulip blossoms: the size of the bulb and seasoning with cold temperatures, called chilling or cooling. Chill the bulbs for 10 weeks prior to planting, fooling them into thinking they’ve had winter. In the South, that means the bulbs should go into the refrigerator in mid-September. 

You might not choose the color combination for an evening out, but pink and orange wears well in tulips. For a rainbow of luscious colors, plant gobs of a Darwin Tulip Mix.

Big pots of tall strong-stemmed pink and orange triumph tulips can’t be missed in a front yard. Pair the fabulous dark purple, almost black, tulip Queen of the Night with the lily flowered pastel pink and yellow tulip ‘Elegant Lady’. What a beautiful combination.

For the same combination on one blossom, try Tulip ‘Wendy Love’. She blushes from yellow to rose pink as her cups age. A whole bed devoted to her will show out with all of her colors.

Unwind in the garden after a busy workday. Even if the lovely colors aren’t too visible, the whites glow in the moonlight, and whiffs of perfume help to melt away the cares of the day. White tulips, like Tulip 'Weisse Berliner', not only light up the evening hours but this one has a bouquet of blooms atop each stem.

They can be tall or short, with large or small blooms. The blossom shapes can be wide and fringed, like the parrot tulips, or have laid back pointed petals, like the lily-flowered tulips, or have many petals and be blousy, like the peony-flowered tulips. Then there’s just the plain old tulip shape, an elegant goblet.

Peony tulips are very hardy. Tulip ‘Angelique’, a pale pink loosely ruffled tulip, is one of the most popular tulips in the world. Parrot tulips are large and tropical looking. They’re well suited to the southern garden, opening, bearing up to the sun, and then closing up every night when the sun goes down.

Ready the ground about a month before planting. Southern tulip gardens can go in the ground in December and as late as January. Here is how BJ, a tulip lover in South Carolina, raises thousands of tulips every year in her garden.

• First, till up the beds. Tulips like well-drained soil. They respond to over wet soil by rotting.
• Then add cottonseed meal, bone meal, blood meal, alfalfa, and fishmeal.
• She then lets the soil rest for at least 2 weeks.
• She adds these soil amendments twice a year and doesn’t use any pesticides. "I have some aphids on tulips every once in a while," she says. They haven’t done enough damage to present a problem.
• Dig holes eight inches deep and drop in the bulbs, pointy end up.

When all the tulips are in the ground, she starts over again, planting one hundred flats of pansies and violas over the tops of the bulbs.

For the less ambitious gardener who wants to plant a few bulbs but doesn’t want to hand dig all of those holes, Hound Dog makes an auger that fits on a household cordless power drill. Digging multiple small holes standing up is a great improvement over the troweling on knees approach.

"Buy decent bulbs to get the really nice flowers," BJ says. "A gardener who wants a spot of color should plant fifty of one color in an area.

Most bloom times listed by retailers are for northern growers. In South Carolina, tulips are at their peak from the middle of March to the middle of April. No self-respecting tulip flower would hang around in the May heat.

The big black plastic landscape pots, the kind that trees come in, make great containers. They stand up to all kinds of heat and cold and disappear into the landscape when filled with brilliant flowers.

Use these large pots to display the spectacular flowers of the tulip ‘Grand Perfection’. If there were a dictionary picture entry needed for the word ‘flamboyant’, this tulip would be "perfection". This single early tulip starts out yellow with dark red flames. As the blossoms age, the yellow lightens to cream.

At one time tulip bulbs commanded exorbitant prices. Speculation in the bulbs in early 1600s Holland was called Tulipmania. Many family fortunes were made and lost trading in the rare and beautiful flower coveted by the rich. Eventually, the bottom fell out of the inflated market. The tulip crash of 1634 has been likened to our stock market crash of 1929. Nevertheless, Holland was committed to raising these wonderful bulbs for commerce.

Tulip bulbs today are so inexpensive that using them as annuals and pulling them out at the end of the season is as easy as pulling up any other spent flowers. It is possible to outshine the azalea in the springtime south.

---Posted by Coach Anne, August 20 2008