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| Photo Credit: Gerald Klingaman |
| During the heat of the day, Tulipa greigii spays its flowers open like a water lily. |
I have a love-hate relationship with tulips. I love their beauty in the garden, but I hate that they’re so fleeting in their length of display and intolerant of the conditions my garden has to offer. Alas, all gardeners must come to grips with the fleeting nature of beauty and perfection. (Perhaps it’s this very quest that keeps us hooked on our chosen hobby.)
But Tulipa greigii and its cultivars last longer in our gardens than typical hybrid tulips do because they’re slow to produce offsets. And each spring as this bulb renews itself, it doesn’t have the numerous daughter bulbs to nourish, so the main bulb remains relatively large. This plant was the first species tulip introduced into cultivation directly from the wild. It first flowered in European gardens in 1871 from bulbs collected by P.L. Graeber, a German living in the Central Asian town of Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Back then, in the fine gardens and estates of Europe, cultivated tulip cultivars were suffering a decline in popularity. They were passé, and gardeners lost interest in the gaudy hybrids that breeders in Holland were mass-producing. The arrival of species tulips, like T. greigii, coincided with a new gardening fad sweeping Europe: rock gardening. A kind of horticultural elitism then developed, where wildlings were highly treasured, while mundane cultivars were shunned.
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