I think we outdid ourselves with tulips this year – we planted 300 (Angelique and Cool Crystal) in and around the Rose Garden and 600 (Cistula, Blushing Beauty, Black Hero and Creme Upstar) in the North – not to mention a cutting bed full of them. And they were spectacular! It was the perfect tulip year: They didn’t get eaten by the deer, they started blooming just as the daffodils were going by and they hung on … and on … and on! As a matter of fact some of them were still blooming today. I say “were blooming” because this morning we dug them up and they are now in a sort of organized heap right behind my chair in the potting shed.

For us, tulips in the North and Rose Gardens act as glorious spring place holders for summer annuals and tender perennials. It works clockwork perfectly – when the annuals come out in the fall, we put the tulips right in – the soil is pillow soft and easy; and come spring, just as the tulips are going by, it’s time to plant the annuals. Every year we buy new tulips for those gardens to make sure the show is as stunning as possible and rotate the past year’s to the cutting beds for one more go. Reduce -Add more! Reuse! Recycle! That’s our motto!

Ideally we would wait for the foliage to wither before digging the bulbs out but we don’t have that kind of time – we want to start planting next week! So we dug them leaving the foliage on to dry out and feed the bulbs for another couple of weeks and piled them in a dry place out of the sun (our “office” incidentally). Some rainy day in a couple/three weeks we’ll remove the stalks and paperbag the bulbs for summer storage in the pot cubbies which is as cool, dark and dry a place as we have here.

I’m debating about digging up the tulips in my own garden. On the one hand they are all in patches that I could more easily fill to the gills with annuals if I took the bulbs out first. On the other hand (she had five fingers) I could take my chances on losing a few to the spade, competition and over watering and save myself the trouble of fussing with storage issues. I’ll plant more in the fall either way… What do you do with your tulips?