If you love tulips, but hate that they fade so quickly, you’d probably like to find a way to combine your spring garden with a later blooming one, to keep the color alive in your yard.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Simply plant complimentary plants alongside your tulip beds. But how do you know which plants are compatible? If you’re not careful in your choices, you might just end up killing one plant to save another.
You need to know a bit about the life cycle of a tulip to make a good decision.
First, the reason you can’t cut back or otherwise restrain those yellowing tulip leaves is because the tulip is gathering energy through photosynthesis and storing it all up inside the bulb. The very same bulb you are hoping will bloom again and again. Without those leaves, the bulb won’t have enough stored energy to produce a bloom next year.
During this time, your tulips need water and sun and food just like any other growing plant. Once the leaves have yellowed and withered, though, they require a dormancy period, preferably a dry one. This is why tulips tend to fare better in areas with hot, dry summers. You won’t find tulips in the rain forest!
Here’s where the problems come up. Say for example you’ve planted some annuals along side your tulips so that you can have some summer color in your garden as well. Those annuals are not going to take well to the hot dry conditions your tulip bulbs need, and unless you water them well, you’re likely to end up with withered and dying annuals. But, if you do water them, you’ll be drowning your tulip bulbs.
There are a couple of possible solutions to this dilemma. One, you might want to lift your bulbs after the leaves have yellowed and been removed. Store them away someplace dark and dry until fall, when you can replant them. This plan works, but it’s labor intensive.
You might also just decide to buy and plant tulip bulbs again in the fall. This is how a lot of people do it, and it does work, but again it’s labor intensive. The advantage to this method over the last is that you don’t have to let the leaves die off on their own. You can cut them down as soon as the flower is gone, since you’re not worried about the bulb storing up energy for next season.
If you truly want to naturalize your tulips, though, you need to find plants that are compatible with the conditions required by dormant tulip bulbs. Look for plants which are known to be “drought tolerant” or “drought resistant.” Many varieties, such as coneflower and Caryopteris will flower mid-summer through autumn, making them the perfect companions to a spring tulip bed.
