When planting tulips, mix them up for fun

Autumn brings its own beautiful feeling in the garden, as foliage starts to turn color and temperatures start to fall.

But the hint of flower death as winter approaches also urges us to plant for early spring, when we know we’ll be ever so grateful for any sign of life and color in the landscape.

The way to ensure a pretty March and April is to plant spring-flowering bulbs in the fall – tulips, daffodils, grape hyacinth, alliums, crocuses.

While planting masses of one color of tulip is the surefire way to make an impact in the spring landscape, you can also get creative and change it up this year by combining complementary colors of bulbs, or colors that create a theme.

One such example is the black and gold tulips that Wichita State has planted in the past on its campus. The combination of yellow Mrs. John T. Scheepers and black Queen of the Night tulips said “Shockers.” Both varieties are single, late-season tulips that reach 24 inches tall.

The similarities between the Mrs. and the Queen are important: When combining varieties, you want to be sure that they will bloom at the same time and at the same height. Though “sometimes it’s nice to mix different heights so that you get a layering effect. That’s kind of fun,” said Kari Ossman, campus floral supervisor at WSU.

Combinations are popular with visitors to Botanica, landscape supervisor Pat McKernan said. He likes to put red and yellow tulips together, and pink and purple.

And, interestingly enough, he finds that even if one tulip is supposed to bloom early in the season and another late, they’ll usually bloom together.

“It makes no rhyme or reason,” he said.

It can be difficult to select different types of bulbs, such as tulips and daffodils and hyacinths, to bloom together, said Robin Macy, owner of Bartlett Arboretum in Belle Plaine.

One exception is Aladdin’s Carpet, a mix from catalog and online retailer ColorBlends. Aladdin’s Carpet contains six wild tulips, three muscari (grape hyacinth) and a dwarf narcissus for a wild-meadow effect.

“It looks kind of like an Oriental rug. Plant them toe-to-toe and it’s a big show,” Macy said.

ColorBlends has all the combinations figured out in its gorgeous mixtures, the bulbs selected for uniform height and blooming time, the names of the varieties proprietary (and orders of $50 minimum; www.colorblends.com).

“We do our own combining,” Ossman said. Here are some mixes she likes:

▪ For red and yellow, 22-inch Red Oxford and Golden Oxford, or early doubles Monsella (a red-feathered yellow) and Abba (red with an occasional yellow flame).

▪ Princess Irene (orange flushed with purple) and Yokohama (yellow), side by side.

▪ Blushing Lady (rosy pink and yellow), Blushing Beauty (yellow and rosy red) and Temple of Beauty (salmon rose), all single lates and 24 inches tall.

▪ Blue Jacket hyacinth and orange Princess Irene tulip.

If you want a variety of color in one tulip, Ossman recommends Gudoshnik, “a midseason Darwin Hybrid ... in a perfect mix of red, yellow, orange and a heather of all three colors.”

To actually combine mammoth amounts of bulbs, the WSU crew uses a huge aluminum dish that had a former life in hardware. A crate of 500 bulbs of one kind of bulb and a crate of 500 bulbs of another kind are slowly poured into the dish at the same time, Ossman said. Then when they get poured back into crates, they get mixed a little more.

“That’s worked really well for me,” she said.

Ossman said that her crew starts planting bulbs a bit early, on Oct. 15. She recommends having them planted by the third week of November for best results. That way bulbs can be watered well twice before a freeze, to get the soil settled around the bulbs and the roots going.

But don’t wait until October to shop for your bulbs if you want the best selection.

This story was originally published September 14, 2014 at 4:21 PM with the headline "When planting tulips, mix them up for fun."