April is tulip-blooming time, but at area attractions, work happens months earlier

Two of the top places in Kansas to see tulips in the spring are ready to show off thousands of the flowers this month with special events.

Tulip Festival at Botanica, Wichita’s 17-acre garden attraction where 66,000 tulip bulbs were planted, kicked off April 2 and will continue the next two Saturdays, April 9 and 16, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Several family activities, as well as special activities — pictures with the Easter Bunny on April 9 and two Wichita Children’s Theatre & Dance Center performances of “Three Billy Goats Gruff on April 16 — will happen during the Tulip Festival.

Belle Plaine’s Bartlett Arboretum, whose tulip celebration started as a memorial to the founder’s 7-year-old daughter who died in 1918 of the Spanish flu, is holding its two-day Art at the Arb event, featuring artisans and live music, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday, April 9 and 10. Visitors can stroll the grounds to view the displays of more than 35,000 bulbs while shopping and listening to music.

Both attractions rely heavily on volunteers to plant the bulbs in the fall, with the rewards being colorful blooms that awe springtime visitors in April.

Starting with leftovers

While Botanica’s tulip gardens are now a well-planned and well-designed process —overseen by 35-year-employee Pat McKernan — the attraction’s first tulip garden actually consisted of free leftovers from a local garden club’s tulip bulb sale.

Now, McKernan, the landscape supervisor, pores through as many as a dozen catalogs in June to come up with a list of which bulbs to order by July 1.

He compares the varieties he’s selected to those he’s chosen in the past six or seven years, making sure to include longtime favorites like the Olympic Flame, Big Chief and Monte Carlo, as well as introducing new varieties to visitors. A Darwin hybrid, the Olympic flame features large blooms with bright golden yellow petals and cherry-red flames. Another Darwin hybrid, the Big Chief, has petals in the rosy pink and salmon families. The Monte Carlo is a bright yellow, double-bloomed flower.

This year, he ordered 66,000 bulbs, representing more than 110 varieties, with 31 being new to Botanica.

“I do it all by hand,” McKernan said about drawing the designs of where the bulbs will go.

The Margie Button Memorial Garden, which surrounds a three-level, cascading fountain, gets 17,000 bulbs alone and is the first garden he designs. The second is the entry garden. One year the Button Garden gets pinks and whites, while the entry garden gets yellows and oranges and then he alternates the colors for the next year.

He tends to design the gardens with certain colors in mind, but in 2016, a delivery truck dumped a pallet of bulbs so they were all mixed up, forcing McKernan to redesign some of the gardens.

Come November, about 20 to 25 volunteers help Botanica gardening staff plant the bulbs every Tuesday and Thursday mornings up until about Thanksgiving, before Botanica’s Illuminations holiday light display event kicks off.

Many of those volunteers return when the tulips have finished blooming, which can start in mid-April and go through early May, to pull up the plants that are then sold at 15 cents a bulb to the public on Fridays, starting at 8 a.m. Often they’re gone within an hour.

“It’s a frenzy. They come in and clean up a lot of bulbs in an hour,” he said of the bulb buyers.

In Kansas, tulips can sometimes be more of an annual flower since gardeners can’t be assured of their repeat growth. That’s why attractions and other professionally landscaped places tend to pull the bulbs after a season rather than have empty spots in their next year’s gardens.

While the Saturday Tulip Festivals come with a variety of additional programming, visitors can, of course, see the tulips on display during regular Botanica hours, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $10 adults, $8 seniors, youth and military, free for children ages 2 and younger and members.

To attend Tulip Festival, visitors must purchase advance tickets with timed entries. Add-on purchases for Tulip Festival include 11 a.m. tulip tours and an Easter egg hunt from 3 to 5 p.m. on April 9 for children 11 and younger. Visit botanica.org/tulip-fest for more information and to buy tickets.

A memorial for Maxine

When Glenn Bartlett from Belle Plaine, off fighting in World War I in Europe, got a letter in 1918 telling him his 7-year-old sister, Maxine, had died of the Spanish flu, he wrote back to his parents that they must find a way to memorialize her at the arboretum the family had started in 1910.

When he returned to his hometown, the Bartlett Arboretum created its annual tulip event in her memory, a tradition that caretaker and owner Robin Macy carries on today with the help of the volunteers she calls her soil brothers and sisters.

“It’s a beautiful tradition that Dr. William Bartlett started,” Macy said, referring to the physician who started the tree museum that regular visitors call the Arb.

Macy tends to lose count after ordering 35,000 bulbs, she said. Through friendships she’s developed with two “bulb barons,” as she calls them — Piet Stuifbergen and Tim Schipper — the Arb also receives donations of unsold bulbs from barons’ companies in October. Stuifbergen’s company is also a supplier for Johnson’s Garden Centers.

In the Arb’s sunny Terrace of Paris Garden, Macy likes to plant the French Blend Rose tulip mix that Schipper’s Colorblends company stocks. The mix includes what Macy calls “the Mercedes Benz of tulips,” meaning they are among the best Darwin hybrid varieties and offer pretty pinks and apricot colors that reflect springtime.

Macy isn’t as meticulous as McKernan about planning and designing her tulip beds, preferring a more “rambling” outcome, she said. She guesses between 30 and 40 varieties are represented. While most of the planting happens in the fall, this year some planting happened in January.

For retiree and Arb volunteer Kyle Robinson, who helps plant the tulips, “overwhelming isn’t the right word (for the tulip displays). It’s outstanding.”

In at least his third year of planting tulips he calls the fall planting ritual, along with his other volunteer efforts at the Arb, “an effort of love.”

The Arb, too, pulls its tulip bulbs once done blooming. The bulbs are given away by the fistfuls to visitors on Mother’s Day, which is May 8.

Art at the Arb runs 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Macy expects to also have live music concerts Sundays in April. Admission is a $10 suggested donation, with accompanied children free.

For more about the April 9 and 10 Art at the Arb event, visit facebook.com/events/1092801357953446.

Free to see, along with art

While not as expansive as the gardens at Botanica and the Arb, the tulip gardens on the Wichita State University campus also tend to be attractive displays of springtime color. They’re also easy on the pocketbook, as it’s free to walk around the campus. Some of the gardens are near or around sculptures that are part of the Ulrich Museum of Art’s Martin H. Bush Outdoor Sculpture Collection, offering a two-for-one experience.

This year, the WSU gardeners planted more than 9,000 bulbs representing about 15 varieties, according to landscaper Lowell Kaufman.

While they tend to mix different varieties for different colors in the bed, traditionally the landscapers plant red tulips in the garden beds surrounding Tom Otterness’s Millipede sculpture near the Fairmount Street campus entrance off 17th Street.

If you go

Botanica’s Tulip Festival

When: 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturdays, April 9 and 16

Where: 701 Amidon, Wichita

Admission: $10 adults, $8 seniors, youth and military, free for children ages 2 and younger and members. To attend Tulip Festival, visitors must purchase advance tickets with timed entries. Add-on purchases for Tulip Festival include 11 a.m. tulip tours and an Easter egg hunt from 3 to 5 p.m. April 9.

More information: 316-264-0448 or botanica.org/tulip-fest

Art at the Arb

When: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, April 9 and 10

Where: 301 N. Line St., Belle Plaine

Admission: $10 suggested donation at gate, accompanied children free

More information: 620-488-3451 or facebook.com/events/1092801357953446

This story was originally published April 3, 2022 at 4:18 AM.