Gadenin日本語Get the appThe shape of the tulip year
Tulips do everything in a compressed window. They root through late autumn and winter, chill for three to four months, grow and flower in a few weeks of spring, rebuild the bulb over six weeks of foliage, and then spend the whole of summer asleep underground. Nothing you do at the height of summer matters much except keeping them dry.
That rhythm is why tulips fit awkwardly into a mixed border. They are conspicuous for a fortnight, scruffy for six weeks, and absent for half the year. Planning around the calendar, rather than reacting to it, is most of what makes tulips work in a garden.
The table below is the whole cycle. The section after it covers the two decisions that determine whether the cycle repeats: lifting versus leaving, and treating them as annuals.
| Season | What the plant is doing | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| Early autumn | Dormant in storage | Buy bulbs, keep them cool and dry, start chilling in mild climates |
| Mid to late autumn | Nothing yet | Wait for soil below 55F (13C), then plant six to eight inches deep |
| Late autumn to winter | Rooting, then chilling | Nothing. Protect from squirrels, keep pots barely damp |
| Late winter | Shoots break the surface | Remove heavy mulch, watch for fire on emerging shoots |
| Early spring | Rapid growth, buds forming | Water only if dry, check for aphids and slugs |
| Mid spring | Flowering | Remove any distorted plants, avoid wetting the foliage |
| Late spring | Petals dropping | Deadhead the seed pod, keep the stem, feed once with potassium |
| Six weeks after flowering | Rebuilding the bulb | Leave every leaf, stop watering as they yellow |
| Early summer | Foliage gone, dormant | Lift and store, or leave in dry ground and mark the spot |
| Mid to late summer | Dormant | Keep the ground dry. Sort stored bulbs and discard the small ones |
Lifting and storing, step by step
Lifting is worth doing if your summer is wet, if the bed is needed for summer planting, or if bulbs have started splitting and you want to grade them by size. It is not worth doing if your soil is dry and sharply drained in summer, where bulbs are better off left undisturbed and deep.
Lift only when the foliage has completely yellowed. Lifting green means interrupting the rebuilding process, and the bulb you store will be smaller than it should be.
- Dig wide, not close Start a fork eight inches (20 cm) out from where the stems were and lever the whole clump up. A fork driven straight down through the middle of a clump slices bulbs, and a sliced bulb rots in storage and infects its neighbors.
- Clean off soil, do not wash Rub the soil off by hand once the bulbs have dried for a few hours. Washing them puts water into the neck and base plate, which is exactly where rot starts. Pull off loose roots and the old shriveled parent bulb.
- Dry them for a week or two Spread the bulbs in a single layer in trays somewhere warm, dry and airy, out of direct sun. They need to be surface dry and firm before storage. Any bulb that is soft, discolored or has dark sunken lesions goes in the bin, not the store.
- Grade by size and discard the small ones Only bulbs above about an inch and a quarter (3 cm) across will flower. Smaller offsets take two or three years of growing on to reach flowering size, and most gardeners are better off composting them and buying fresh.
- Store cool, dry and dark until planting Paper bags, mesh sacks or open trays in a shed or garage at 60 to 70F (15 to 21C) with air movement. Never sealed plastic, and never next to stored fruit, whose ethylene destroys the flower bud inside the bulb.
Label every bag as you fill it with the color, the height and where the bulbs came from. In autumn all tulip bulbs look identical, and an unlabelled bag turns careful lifting into a lottery.
Or treat them as annuals, deliberately
Many experienced gardeners plant large-flowered tulips fresh every autumn, pull them out entirely after flowering, and use the space for summer planting. It costs the price of bulbs and it delivers a full-strength display every single year, with no scruffy foliage phase and no gradual decline.
It also solves the border problem. Tulips lifted and composted in late spring free the ground for annuals or tender perennials at exactly the right moment, so nothing sits empty. If you have a small garden and limited beds, this is usually the better arrangement.
The middle path is to plant species and botanical tulips permanently in a hot dry spot where they will naturalise and increase, and to plant the big showy ones as annuals in pots and borders. That combination gives you tulips that return without any work and tulips that perform without any compromise, and it stops you expecting the wrong thing from either group.
Records that make next year easier
Note the date you planted, the date the first shoots appeared, the date the first flower opened and the date the foliage came off. Four dates per block, and after two seasons you can predict your own garden's tulip season to within a few days rather than guessing from generic advice.
Add the position of each block relative to something permanent, and how many bulbs went in against how many flowers came up. That is the record that tells you which corners of the garden hold tulips and which ones eat them, and it is the difference between replanting blindly every autumn and replanting where you know it works.