Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Tulips in Marin

From random photos


Generally speaking as a cost conscience gardener, I find tulips to be a extravagant horticultural endeavour.

It is true that they are incredibly beautiful but their beauty is just too fleeting for me.

I would embrace them more if they repeated their bloom the following season but our weather is much too mild to set the bulb into a full dormancy period.


For this reason I find that the one time investment be limited to a few pots, thus I get my spring flower fix , though here in California the tulips generally bloom in winter.

From random photos


From random photos

3 comments:

Phrago said...

Hard to not like those short lived Tulips! I attended a lecture several years ago by world reknown Trillium and rock garden expert, Fred Case. He said that to be successfull with Tulips it is helpful to plant them on top of a piece of slate so that they could not bury themselves into the ground, a trait that they developed living on hillsides in regions where the ground was often unstable and worn away during the Winter. This is what causes Tulips to slowly die off over the years. They get so deep that they smother themselves...

Kaveh Maguire said...

I'm always tempted to get some tulips but as you said they are so fleeting here and I don't have much space. I love the fragrance so I get my fill by making a point of stopping and smelling them every time I stop in a nursery to pick up other things.

Denise said...

I don't usually get into tulips but am glad I did this year. The same pot of tulips has been in bloom since the 13th of February, with a couple more coming into bud. Lilies don't last that long in bloom for me. With all the static, year-round evergreen stuff I grow (succulents, agaves, medit. shrubs) the extravagance of such fleeting stuff has been worth it this year.