April 2016

It is undeniable that the hybrid tulip is a work of art. They are relatively new to the world of horticulture,though,  only arriving in Europe around 1554. It was the merchants and travellers of the Silk Road, along which many species of wild tulips grow, who brought them to the West, in particular Istanbul, as early as the 12^th century.

My love of tulips certainly sprung from a love of the cultivated garden variety, yet my admiration of and frustration with species tulips is what persists. Still I can’t help but plant hybrids every year. Anna Pavrod calls the wild tulips “willfully variable” and notes that “ establishing clear links and breeding lines is a problem” with all the hybrids we see today.

Certainly at this point the hybrids are being hybridized with the hybrids. And what is genetic chaos has created a kaleidoscope of beauties for the spring garden in temperate climes.

Here are a few of my favorites, at least this year:

There is nothing like the rich colors achieved by hybridizers .‘Jan Reus’, remains one of my all time favorites for that incredible and indescribable color.

Equally saturated of color is the lustily black-purple ‘Havran’.

By now everyone knows of my pension for red and white tulips.

I grew ‘Leen van der Mark’ for the first time this year. It looks like a artfully flayed radish, but what I found really beautiful about this tulip was how it aged, the white turning soft pink and the red turning a lovely merlot. And it held up for a long time in our abnormally hot spring.

This single ‘Burning Heart’ has been reblooming in my garden for years now, its elegance not marred in the least by the weedy bed it inhabits. A true classic, and my absolute favorite.

Then there is “Grand Perfection”. Need I say more?

If red-and-white isn’t your thing, there is always purple-and-white like ‘Rembrandt’s Favorite’. These “broken” tulips are really what started the whole 16^th century tulips craze and the subsequent obsessive hybridization of tulips.

Sometimes it seems the hybridizers have gone mad. ‘Miami Sunset’–a tulip would never live in Miami–has all the audacity of a tropical flower. What colors!!

Still there are many lovely tulips that remain close to their wild ancestors.‘Analita’ is part of the Fosteriana Group of tulips, small, early and beautiful.

‘Taco’ looks to me like a Tulipa clusiana hybrid but it is thrown in the Miscellaneous Group, a testament to the genetic confusion that tulips have become.

Even with all extraordinary beauty —did I use the words “beauty” and “lovely” enough in this post — of the hybrid tulips, it is the simple charms of the true species which keep me enthralled. Tulipa linifolia has returned reliably for me. I grow it in a pot with the yellow leaved hosta ‘ On Stage’.

Most of you would disagree with me if I said spring is drab, especially those of you in the Pacific Northwest where spring came early and marches rapidly forward with an unprecedented succession of blooms.

But spring is drab.

At least some places.

And one of them is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where I spent Easter week. It was not your typical spring break vacation, no palms, no sunny sands. There were a few balmy days near 60, though, melting most of the snow.

Even though the calendar said it was spring, we were days past the equinox, even though there a few robins hopped through the brown fields and the sand hill cranes landed with a gusto of trumpeting behind my mother’s house, it did not look at all like what we might call spring.

But it was spring!

When I was growing up in the Great Lakes region this was one of my favorite times of year. I loved looking for signs of spring, the first sprig of grass, the green nubs of bulbs poking through. I have not been back home in the early spring in many decades. This was a treat for me.

So I headed out to the sugar maple woods to see if anything was coming up.

One of the earliest to emerge is Claytonia virginica, spring beauty.

Allium tricoccum, ramps or wild leek, were also pushing through.

Even my mother’s lupines that have naturalized along the road in the tall grass began to grow in the few warm days after snow melt.

Certainly this is not the big show that is being posted all over the web these days. But it is also spring: determined shoots responding to the first warmth.

And this is also beautiful to those who look.

No tulip, daffodil or lilac is as beautiful to me as that first growth after winter. I’m glad I had a chance to go back and experience it again.

But I was equally glad to move south to Milwaukee where the first dreaded dooryard violets, Viola sororia, were popping through the greening lawns. Color was definitely on the return, as I flew back to the tropical temperature in the Pacific Northwest.