Gardener's Almanac: Tulips

It's time to plant bulbs for spring blooms. I was talking to Tim Schipper, owner of one of my favorite tulip catalogs, Colorblends, the other day.

Tim Schipper's tulip advice is simple:

1. Plant your tulips bulbs before Thanksgiving.

2. Performance is fool-proof the first spring "even if you plant the bulbs upside down."

3. If you prize perfection, pull the tulips out and discard them after they bloom once, because they diminish in subsequent years.

4. But if you want to keep tulips around to bloom a second spring you have to leave the foliage in the ground until it gets all yellow and ugly (i.e. "cured"). "Cutting down green bulb foliage is like stripping the leaves off a tree."

5. If you have a deer problem, don't even try to grow tulips. "Hang out the white flag of surrender and switch to daffodils."

I love the many different effects you can get by mixing tulips and I think the color combinations that Tim creates and sells, mostly to institutions and professional designers, are brilliant. You can order his bulb mixes too. Plant them out front and the neighbors will think you really have flare.

He told me he had his Eureka! moment back in 1985. Tim is a third generation Dutch tulip merchant and was visiting potential customers at a swank Washington, D.C. golf course with a full-time horticulturalist. "The guy was a total tulip nut," Tim told me. "He showed me these flower beds where he had combined different colored tulips and they looked fantastic."

Tim had never seen anything like it before because the Dutch considered mixing and blending tulip varieties a "heresy." They viewed tulips as a crop, like wheat or potatoes, and they went to great lengths to keep their colors pure and separate in the growing fields. "And this carried over into how tulips were used in decorations," said Tim. Traditionally, they were grown in distinct blocks of colors, not intermixed.

But Americans like to mix and match. The problem with making up your own blend of tulips is that if you look in a catalog and you think the red ones and the yellow ones would look good blended together, you usually find the following May that the red ones finish blooming a week before the yellow ones.

Blending tulip colors is trickier than it looks. Which is why most purveyors sell daffodil mixes, not tulip mixes.

When Tim started creating his own mixes of tulips for his company Colorblends in his Bridgeport, CT., test garden, he found that nine out of ten tulip combinations he tried didn't work.

"The timing was wrong. Or some types were too big. Or some were to short. Or they were no longer available from the grower. People can try this at home, but if they buy my blends, the mistakes and rejects are on my nickel, not their nickel," Tim told me.

Through trial and error, Tim has developed and marketed dozens of classy tulip mixes that do work. He believes that "blending tulips is a little like mixing chemicals. Get it wrong and nothing happens, or maybe too much. Get it right and the colors seem to feed off each other."

He clearly has an artist's touch, because some of his combinations are as stunning as they are unlikely. He considers the names of the tulips he combines a trade secret but he gives his mixes their own names, such as "French Blend," which sounds like a coffee but is instead a spectrum of eight compatible colors. "Purdy" is a happy-go-lucky combination of poppy red, deep purple and golden yellow. "Above & Beyond" has three tulips that work even though they bloom at slightly different heights. "Aladdin's Carpet" is the most fashion forward mix using six wild tulips, three muscari and a dwarf narcissus that give the effect of a wild meadow.

To see how these combinations actually look, visit his website. The majority of his clients are institutions and professional garden designers and the minimum order is $50 in quantities of 100 bulbs. But even if you're a homeowner who knows little about gardening, these combinations will make you look like a horticultural genius. Colorblends (1-888-847-8636; www.colorblends.com.)