How are your tulips looking? It will depend where you live, where you’ve planted them (in pots on a sun-bleached south-facing patio or somewhere shaded and north-facing, where they have quietly kept going for years) and what varieties you’ve gone for. The delicate candy-hued Tulipa saxatilis can bloom as early as March; the inky ‘Queen of Night’ might be getting going only now.
In most cases, unless you’re preparing for the Chelsea flower show (good luck to you, stay hydrated, it will all be fine), some of your spring bulbs will have “gone over” – as in, flowered then lost their petals. I know, it happens so fast: one moment we’re celebrating the harbingers of spring with snowdrops, Iris reticulata and daffs of all varieties, the next you’re looking at a bed of green stalks and frenzied growth, lightly panicking about how much there is to do in the garden.
If you went wild with the bulb order last year, you may now be facing a small dilemma. Every year I’m asked what to do once bulbs have gone over. Depending on the variety, bulbs can last anywhere between a few years and decades, so their annual life cycle is going to unfold in front of you. Nothing can bloom all the time.
Bulbs exist to reproduce: the fat swelling in the middle of a tulip flower – or just beneath a narcissus – is an ovary feverishly making seeds. Deadheading directs the plant’s energy away from producing seeds and lets it channel it elsewhere – such as into feeding its bulb for better blooms next year. It’s a crucial and quite satisfying job: simply snap off the stem beneath the ovary.
You then have two options: leave them, or lift them from the bed to store elsewhere. I have used a big ugly tub filled with secondhand compost. If I had smart shelves in a dry outbuilding, I might use those. The bulbs will wait five months until they’re planted again in November, freeing up space to plant something else.
Increasingly, though, I deadhead and leave. When the foliage has turned yellow, it has done its job and can be gently pulled away. The stems grow pale and tatty, but new foliage will creep up around them. The bare soil of the bed gathers green as the days stretch out. Some tulips, such as ‘La Belle Époque’, put on a fantastic display just before their petals drop: I cut those for the kitchen table, leaving the leaves – those little photosynthesising engines – to feed the bulb as the sun shines.
It feels a bit messy. But it’s not for long: the lawn is growing, the clematis is coming out, the roses are budding up. There’s plenty more happening in the garden, and below the earth next spring’s tulips are getting ready.
