24 - Friday, November 13, 1987 ~ North Shore News

Botanical tulips offer
unique shades, shapes

GOLDEN DAFFODILS, heady
hyacinths, exotic fritillarias, tiny
crocuses ... Canadian gardeners
have a wealth of choices when it
comes to spring-flowering bulbs.

Tulips, especially, give us a wide
range of colors, ranging from
white and green through red and
blue and even black. In fact, there
is so much choice among modern
tulips that few of us even give a
thought to their ancestors — the
beautiful, unusual, yet easy-to-
grow botanical tulips.

Botanical tulips are the wild
tulips from which all the modern
hybrids arose. Long before people
began crossing different tulips to
create totally new kinds, nature
had provided a wealth of beautiful
shades and forms, many of them
known for centuries.

Botanical tulips are often
smaller than modern garden tulips
and are well suited to borders or
rock gardens where their special
beauty is seen to best advantage.
Most of them are especially handy,
being naturally equipped with

everything it takes to survive in the

wild.

With botanical tulips, one plan-
ting is usually sufficient to keep
your garden in flower for many
years to come. In fact, most of
them multiply so readily that each
passing year brings more and more
color.

There are abcut 60 to 70 species
of wild tulips, most originating
from the Mediterranean region and
Caucasian. Most people probably
wouldn’t recognize them as tulips
at all, because they often don’t
have the cup-shaped flowers of the
modern hybrids. |

Also, many botanicals bear sev-
eral flowers per stalk and their
leaves are unlike the hybrids: some
are grasslike, others are heavily
mottled with secondary colors.
Even. their bulbs are usually
smaller and hairier than those of
hybrid tulips. \

Perhaps the most popular
botanical tulips are the star-shaped
blooms of the tiny rock garden
varieties Tulipa tarda (yellow) and

T. turkestanica (cream) — both of |

which bloom so heavily. that their
foliage is often completely
covered. Other beautiful and easy
to grow species are T. clusiana
(white striped red), T. chrysantha
{red and yellow) and T. urumiensis
(yellow). .

Botanical tulips were
rediscovered about 70 years ago,
and since then horticulturists have
gone back to work trying to im-
prove them, notably by increasing
their color range. Kaufmanniana
tulips, for example, although often
listed as botanicals, are usually
hybrids.

These early-blooming tulips bear

colorful, wide-open flowers on
campact plants (15-20 cm). Many
have been crossed with Griegii
tulips, another common botanical,
-and have inherited colorful foliage
from that parent.
_ Three popular. Kaufmanniana
hybrids are ‘‘The First’? (white
with carmine), ‘Early Harvest’
(deep red with yellow) and
‘Giusseppe Verdi’ (carmine red
with yellow edges).

Greigii tulips © are sirailar to

PLEDGE.

CANADIAN DENTAL ASSOCIATION .

Kaufmanniana tulips but bloom
later. Some of the preferred Greigii
hybrids are ‘Cape Cod’ (orange)
and ‘Plaisir’ (creamy ivory with
red stripes and spots). They are
taller than Kaufmanniana tulips
(30 to 30 cm) and all have attrac-
tively striped or mottled foliage.
The Fosteriana group has the
honor of hosting the world’s most
popular tulip, ‘Red Emperor’.
Tall-growing (35-40 cm) like the
other Fosterianas, ‘Red Emperor’
boasts enormous scarlet red
See Tulips

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Pacific Western Industries Ltd.
1547 Welch St., N. Vancouver

149 West Third |

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987-1577