Planting Plans

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Tulips are among the most brilliant and cheerful of spring flowering plants. Fortunately, too, they are among the easiest to work with in creating artistic landscape effects. 

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If you buy top-grade bulbs and follow a practical plan when you plant them this fall, tulips just can’t disappoint you.

Good Landscape Effect

For a good landscape effect, tulips should always be massed. If you plant them in clumps in a mixed perennial border or elsewhere, each clump should have at least a dozen bulbs. And it’ll be even more effective if it consists of a dozen and a half or two dozen. 

If you plant them in beds, each color area should be large enough to stand out as an individual entity when viewed from a distance. 

Depending on the size of the bed and the distance from which it may be viewed, each color area should consist of a dozen to several dozen bulbs. 

Never “spot” tulips here and there individually, and never string them out in scanty single rows.

Various low to medium-height plants can be combined with tulips either planted in front of them or interspersed with them—to ensure a pleasing color combination. 

Among these are dwarf phlox, forget-me-nots, candytuft, alyssum, aubrieta, arabis, primroses, pansies, dwarf azaleas, and the like. 

The colors of both the tulip and the companion plant should, of course, be borne in mind when you make your choice, and if in doubt, use white-flowered companions.

Providing Tulip Bloom

To provide bloom after the tulips are finished, you can choose from a wide variety of annuals, from summer and fall flowering bulbs like gladiolus and dahlias or from late flowering herbaceous perennials like hardy asters and chrysanthemums. 

If you’d like to, you can duplicate the tulip color scheme with the plants that follow them—for instance, red and white zinnias can be planted to follow red and white tulips, or you can change the picture entirely by choosing different colored follow-ups.

Groups According To Color Varieties

The following varieties are grouped according to color and can be depended upon to give you the best possible effect.

WHITE

  • Duke of Wellington
  • Zwanenburg
  • White Cross (lily flowered)
  • White Glory
  • Mount Hood
  • Mount Erebus
  • White Giant,
  • White Sail
  • Kansas

YELLOW

  • Golden Age
  • Palembang
  • Mrs. John T. Scheepers
  • Belle Jaune
  • Golden Harvest

YELLOW AND ORANGE

  • Southern Cross
  • Sunburst
  • Prince Carnival
  • Keizerskroon
  • General deWet

PINK

  • Princess Elizabeth
  • Pride of Zwanenburg
  • Clara Butt
  • Marjorie Bowen
  • Aristocrat
  • Smiling Queen
  • Peach

RED

  • Pride of Haarlem
  • Red Advance
  • Scarlet Wonder
  • Crater
  • Philip Snowden
  • Kornephoros
  • City of Haarlem
  • All Bright
  • William Pitt
  • Scarlet Leader
  • Eclipse
  • Bartigon
  • Prunus

PURPLE AND BRONZE

  • LaTulipe Noire
  • Don Pedro
  • Giant
  • Bishop
  • Indian Chief
  • Louis XIV
  • Queen of the Night
  • Unsurpassable
  • Telescopium

Parrot Tulips

Among the best parrot tulips, which appeal to many gardeners because of their fringed petals and intriguingly informal shapes, are:

  • Blue Parrot, violet
  • Fantasy, salmon pink
  • Faraday, cream with red and green veins
  • Therese, scarlet
  • Orange Favorite
  • Firebird, red with green streaks

Early Flowering Doubles

Among early flowering doubles are:

  • Peach Blossom
  • Orange Nassau
  • Dante, red
  • Marechal Niel, light rust
  • Ibis, red with white edges 

Late Doubles

Among late doubles, there are the giant peony flowered varieties such as:

  • Uncle Tom, maroon
  • Mount Tacoma, white