I think tulips are gorgeous, and when the John Scheepers catalog arrives every fall, I often find myself excitedly making a list of all the colorful and fragrant tulips I’m going to buy. Then reality sets in.
With my limited garden space, it seems like a waste to plant something that gives me dying, brown foliage to look at from late spring into mid-summer. And many tulips (especially the most colorful varieties) will only bloom for a few years. Then you need to dig up and divide the bulbs or buy and plant new ones. It’s a bit too much work in my opinion.
But my biggest challenge is Tulip Enemy Number One:
For years I couldn’t figure out what critter was spite-murdering all my tulips. A tulip bud would be ready to burst open one day, and the next day I would find it lying limp on the ground either whole or in pieces. The blooms were never eaten, just terrorized. It was exasperating.
Then from the window one spring, I spotted a squirrel sneaking up to one of my newly-blooming tulips. He grabbed the stem in his grubby little mitts and began pulling it toward his mouth. I shrieked and waved and knocked on the window. He didn’t let go. He just stared at me without moving. It gave me enough time to sprint out the door and around the corner to where he was committing the crime. I’d stopped him just in time. Then because I knew I’d be spending the entire day obsessively looking out the window for him to return, I snipped the tulip and brought it inside with me to enjoy in a vase instead.
All the tulips in the backyard were mercilessly beheaded so many times that I surrendered and eventually dug them all up. I have one small patch of red Triumph tulips in the front yard that the squirrels are kind enough to leave untouched. Perhaps they aren’t as violently angry with red tulips as they are with pink and apricot ones.
If you don’t have marauding, tulip-murdering squirrels in your neighborhood and you’d like to grow them, a great way to cover up the tulips once they are done blooming is to interplant them with daylilies. By the time the tulips are entering their ugly phase, the daylily foliage is big enough to hide them. I added mums to my tulip bed as well so I have blooms from early spring (squirrel-permitting) through late fall.