Tulips

     The tulip is the best of flowers, at least for our area.  Its plusses:  easy to grow, pretty blooms that last a fair amount of time, and perhaps best of all, when they are done, they retreat into the sod and you can run the lawn mover over them (well, over their “grave”, because after June you can’t find a trace of them) all summer long.  Then, in the spring, as early as February, up they come to remind you that life will continue when you most need that reminder.

     The “ancient pulse of germ and birth” will go on.  (Thomas Hardy “the Darkling Thrush”)

  

  One problem with tulip-keeping:  In the spring, you see that one group needs a few more, or a few less plants.  Can you remember which group needs help or where that group is located when fall rolls around and it’s time to dig up the bulbs, split them apart and replant in time for the bulbs to go through the winter freeze necessary to get them to grow again next spring?

    I guess you could dig them in June between their demise and the disappearance of any evidence of where they are planted, but I’ve never done that.  There are always too many other things to attend to at that time of the year.

      I do have a map of the big producers, just south of the garage.  They are 54 inches south of the garage wall, and 50 inches east of the east door jamb.  The ones separating the yard from the circle drive (all in buffalo grass) are planted in little bowls in the sod where shrubs of 30 years age failed to take root.  I can find them.

    But then there are the ones north and south of the cement driveway leading into the garage, and the ones under the faux pear tree, and the ones in the ditch by the old roadbed leading from the county road to our yard.  The grass does its job of sealing over the site of the dormant plants so remarkably well, I can never come within three feet of locating them. 

      Most of those exposed sites could use a few more bulbs.  They don’t have the easy life of the garage tulips which benefit from the garage’s protection from the spring’s harsh north winds while receiving ample moisture from the garage roof snow slides that apex 54 inches from the garage wall, plus the benefit of southern exposure to winter sunlight.

    So every two or three years, I dig up and thin out the garage tulips which have become overgrown and crowded.  Then I try to find a place to put all the extra bulbs.

     Well, this was not a good year for tulips.  We should be in full bloom this time of year, but . . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     Normally, the snow and cold doesn’t set them back, but April’s record lows and duration of the low temperature pretty much did them in this year.

 

      But a few hardy (not Thomas) souls persist.  I predict that yellow tulips will survive the ice age, while the red and blue (probably purple for you color-sighted folks) ones will go extinct.

 

     Actually, these fellows (gals?) probably were the ones that slept through the alarm and showed up to work late, thus catching the destructive cold weather at a less vulnerable time.

       Blessed be the tardy for they shall inherit the earth?