Are you looking for a pop of red, orange, yellow or pink color in your spring garden? I have a suggestion, plant tulip bulbs in November or December and after enjoying cold winter weather, they will reward you with an uplifting and elegant display of flowers in the spring. Locked inside a tulip (genus Tulipa) bulb is an embryo plant waiting for the opportunity to prosper and for flowers to grow.
The Dutch in the late 1500s discovered tulip and daffodil bulbs in Central Asia and Turkey and introduced them to Europe. Even to this day, more than 400 years later, the Netherlands is the major supplier of spring bulbs and is considered the bulb capital of the world. Thousands of visitors flock to the Keukenhof Gardens near Amsterdam in late March and early April to see the approximately 7 million flower bulbs planted in the garden each year. Because bulbs contain their own food supply, they can be stored for several months and planted with almost 100% success. For this reason, they were one of the first flowering plants brought by the early settlers to the United States.
I love to look at the bulb catalogs I receive in the mail every year in the late summer. Unfortunately, some of the bulbs are not suited to Georgia gardens since we have mild winters with few days that reach temperatures below 32 degrees. Most tulips and daffodil bulbs, as well as lesser-known bulbs such as Allium and Fritillaria, need a period of 6-12 weeks of cold winter weather to stimulate the bulbs to develop into mature, flowering plants in the spring. As a result, many of the fall bulbs found in catalogs are not recommended for Southern gardens.
When I moved from the Pittsburgh area to northern Atlanta 15 years ago, I naively planted Allium bulbs since they were a beautiful addition to my Pittsburgh gardens. After planting the Allium bulbs in the fall, I eagerly…
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