Autumn is the best time to get yourself outside in the garden preparing the soil and planting your spring bulbs. The most popular bulb is the glorious tulip, a truly exceptional perennial with over 100 species to choose from, giving you plenty of variety in colour and form that will brighten up any garden. Holland is the home to the attractive cup shaped flowers and known to produce as many as 3 billion bulbs a year to keep up with the demand.
The range of tulips available to you is enormous, including short low growing plants to tall flowers, which can grown from 10 to 70cm. Typically the tulip produces one flower per stem, but there are some species out there that can produce up to four. It is best to plant your tulip in the fall as they need a period of cool dormancy and can even grow in the cold and snowy winter.
There are many classifications of tulips to choose from:
- Single early tulips: These tulips produce a single flowering, usually short stemmed and bloom in the early in the year.
- Double early tulips: These tulips produce double flowering plants, usually short stemmed and bloom in the early in the year.
- Triumph tulips: These tulips produce a single flowering, usually a medium length stem and tend to flower mid-season. Triumph tulips are normally produced through the hybridisation between a single early tulip and a single late tulip.
- Single late tulips: These tulips produce single flowering, usual long in length of stem and bloom later on in the season.
- Darwin hybrid tulips: These tulips produce single flowering, usual long in length of stem and bloom mid-season.
- Lily-flowered tulips: These tulips produce single flowering, with a variant size of stem, flowering mid-season to late. The flowers tend to produce pointed and curled back petals.
- Parrot tulips: This is a mainly late blooming single flowered tulip, producing fringed, curled and twisted flowers on a various size stems.
Multi-flowered tulips
- Fringed tulips: These tulips flower mid season to late and produce single flowers that showcase petals edged with crystalline fringes.
- Kaufmanniana tulips: These tulips are very early blooming plants, which produces mottled foliage and flowers with a multicoloured base and unlike any other tulip, opens fully.
- Fosteriana tulips: These tulips are early-flowering, producing broad leaves, which can be green or gray-green, sometimes mottled or striped as well as medium to long length stems and large, elongated flowers.
- Greigii tulips: These tulips flower later than the Kaufmanniana group and usually produce mottled or striped foliage, with a variety of shape and sized flowers.
By careful selection you will have a beautiful garden with fine displays provided by tulips from as early as February until the end of May.