Cultivation Of Crops: Tricked by a Tulip

It is impossible to stroll through our Arcata Greenhouses without running into our Resident Tulip Expert, Hans Meester, who may have very well been born from a tulip bulb. This guy eats, sleeps, and breathes tulips, and right now, there’s one particular variety he can’t stop talking about. We asked him to write down his experience with this tulip, in his own words. So Ladies and Gentleman, may we present,

The Trick Tulip

I thought I had seen it all. I have been working with tulips all my life. Growing, forcing, scaling, beheading, planting, harvesting, peeling, preparing, washing, watching, counting, researching and, most of all, talking about them. I used to visit every show there is to see the newest varieties and trends and to talk about tulips, because that’s what tulip people do. We also love to talk about tulips with a good glass in hand and small blocks of cheese to snack on. Here at Sun Valley Farms in Arcata I found a perfect spot to do all of the above. What more can a Dutch tulip grower want?

So I thought I’d seen it all. I was wrong. This February I got Tricked. One of our bulb suppliers sent us a variety that I had seen before and had not yet impressed me, called Trick.

A regular red with a tinting on the leaves. Nothing special. We planted it, grew it in the greenhouse, and then the first surprise came—no tinting on the leaves. Are we talking about the same Trick here? The second surprise was the length. Nice, beefy stems and at least 17 inches tall. The buds were as I knew: pointy and pink and a very nice presentation in the bunch. But the Trick didn’t stop here. As I said the buds are pink, so how to categorize this variety? I shrugged and said it’s a red and it is, but it is all in the eyes of the beholder.

Some said it was pink, some said red and there were even colleagues that called it a bi-color. It was like the blue/gold, silver/white dress: everybody sees something else. This is where it gets interesting. Do we have new marketing tool here, or a new line of tulips: the surprise line?

I decided to take a bunch home and surprise my wife. She loved those big pink (!) flowers and gave the bunch a nice spot in the living room. Then we got tricked again. The next day the flowers opened up completely into a sea of bright red tulips with black hearts....they were practically luminescent.

So no longer pink, but red. In the evening the flowers closed up again into their pink bud stage and the only hint of red was shown on the edges of the petals, justifying the bi-color opinion. Amazing!