Time to Plant Tulips

Time to plant tulips –

It is October 1 and a gardener’s thoughts turn to spring bulbs like tulips.

For generations gardeners dug up tulip bulbs only to replant them in the Fall.

Rochester, New York seedsman James Vick (1818-1882) recalled that practice in his garden magazine.

A suburban gardener wrote to Vick in 1878, “I don’t know of any flowers that afford me more pleasure than my Tulips, because they are so sure and so little trouble.

“I take up the bulbs, dry them a little, and store them away until October, when they are planted again.”

Then she laid out her method of planting the tulips.

“To occupy the Tulip ground, secure a few Petunia plants, or Portulacas, and sometimes Verbena.

“In October these have done flowering, or nearly so, and the Tulip bed is made again.

“In this way I get two seasons of flowers on the same bed in one season.”

Thus in the late nineteenth century she demonstrated the common practice of planting the same bed with both spring tulips and summer annuals.

Boston Seed Company

Like many other late nineteenth century seed companies and nurseries, the Rawson Company, with its main office in Boston’s Fanuel Hall, offered tulips to its customers.

Rawson included this black and white tulip illustration in its seed catalog of 1904. [below]

In the 1880s Alexander H. Ladd in Portsmouth, NH planted hundreds of  tulips each year in his downtown garden.

He too would dig them up and store them for the summer only to plant them later in October.

Unfortunately, one year his baskets were so heavy on the storage shelves he had created that the whole structure collapsed. Hundreds of bulbs fell to the floor. As you can imagine, the next spring saw a mixture of colors and sizes in Ladd’s fields of tulips.

In 1889 he wrote, “I estimate by loss of Bulbs, to have been at least 60,000 – by the rain and want of attention last summer.”

 Year of the Tulip

This is the Year of the Tulip according to the National Garden Bureau which provided this stunning show of modern tulip color. [Below]

Breck’s Bulbs says on its website, “Most bulbs prefer not to be disturbed and can be left in the ground for many years.”

Whether you dig them up after they bloom, or leave them in the ground, October begins the time to plant tulips for spring color.

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