What happens when you plant tulips (too) late?

How many of you have just rifled through the shed and found the bulbs that you meant to plant last autumn?

If you’re wondering what will happen if you put them in now, here’s what happened to me last year, when I found a pristine packet of tulips that I’d bought at Wisley the previous autumn.

Heck, I thought, I’ll put them in now (it was March) and I’ll just get late tulips. Well, no. Instead of emerging much later, they shot into action. Leaves emerged within a couple of weeks.

One bulb proudly displayed a full grown flower. The rest just couldn’t muster the energy to grow any bigger and I had a collection of miniature blooms.

Let’s hope they’ve recovered for a better display this year.

Comments

[VP]

Hi Helen - thanks for giving me the links to your posts over at mine - I'll update my post with them, so that readers get the alternate view.

I'm thinking that perhaps the key factor in our experiences is timing/cold. I suspect your tulips romped away with their leaves without the bulbs having time to put down their roots first. If I remember correctly we had a really warm March in 2010, so the bulbs didn't get enough of a cold spell needed to stimulate root growth?

[VP]

Hi Helen - we're playing commenting ping pong with our blogs ;)

Having read your daffodil post looks like all came well in the end re your tulips. So it looks like all those leaves enabled the bulb to store enough to flower properly the following year. Did the same happen with your daffodils?

My post is now updated. Thanks for your experiences, it adds so much to the information there. So, we can bend this rule, but not totally break it!