Sure there are lots of red tulips to choose from, but here are four reasons you may want to plant the species Tulip, Tulipa praestans.
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Notes from a wildlife-friendly cottage garden
Spring is progressing rapidly, I sometimes feel a bit too fast. Still, it can be downright exhilarating. While many of the Daffodils in the Back Garden have already gone to seed, we are now enjoying a second round of Daffodil blooms, concentrated in the Front Garden.
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The Tulip From Turkestan
After Tulipa kaufmanniana ‘Early Harvest’, the first Tulip to bloom in our garden is T. turkestanica. T. turkestanica is a wild or Species Tulip, whose native range covers rocky hillsides and river valleys extending from Iran through Central Asia and into China’s Uighur region – the origin land of many Tulips. T. kaufmanniana also started as a wild Tulip from Central Asia but for some reason is generally not classified as a Species Tulip.
T. turkestanica has white flowers with orange-yellow centers. The flowers are star-shaped with 6 points, smaller than those of hybrid Tulips. The flowers will open only in sunny weather. The leaves are also interesting: long, wavy, and grey-green.
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This is going to be a short post because we have our son David his partner Meridith visiting from Minnesota this week. So I just want to show you what I think of as our garden’s first wave of Daffodils.
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When we put in the new driveway the narrow strip of lawn bordering the Left Bank Bed became even narrower. So naturally, I decided to dig it up. The new garden space was filled, among other things, with Glory-of-the-Snow (Scilla forbesii, formerly Chionodoxa forbesii).
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It’s nice that’s it’s officially spring and all, but many of us are asking: when will the Tulips bloom?
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If you are thinking about adding Coneflowers (Echinacea sp. and cvs.) to your garden this spring, you might want to look at a recent report put out by the Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware. The Center has done extensive research with an eye to promoting the use of native plant varieties in American home gardens. Their evaluation of several dozen Coneflower species and cultivars is available online. The evaluation, conducted in 2019 and 2020, looked at each plant’s ability to attract pollinators as well as its horticultural performance.
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It is now officially spring, snow has melted, buds are budding, and it seems like a good time for an overview of recent developments.
So most of the garden still looks like this, but there are green bits emerging and even a few flowers.
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Last week Judy had to go downtown to get her second COVID shot (yay!) and while there decided to visit the Lurie Garden. What she found was a bit concerning, especially when combined with other developments at Lurie over the past several months.
It appeared that no attempt had been made to start the spring clean up, though Crocuses and Snowdrops had started to bloom. Normally, a small tractor is used to cut back the grasses and other stems in this 2.5 acre garden. This is done while the ground is still frozen in order to reduce soil compaction and damage to plant crowns and early foliage. Also, it needs to be done early enough to showcase the Lurie’s magnificent bulb display, which features tens of thousands of spring blooms.
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So I thought I was doing a good thing when I planted a purple-leaved Chokecherry (Prunus virginiana ‘Schubert’) in the back garden, and another along the east side of the house. Chokecherry is a small North American tree with great wildlife value. I was looking forward to the flowers, the fruits (small and very sour, but popular with birds), and the butterfly larvae (Chokecherry is a larval host for many butterflies and moths).
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