Last fall, I planted an unknown mix of tulips that I got from the final clearance sale of Thanksgiving Point’s tulip bulbs. They were just in baskets, without any sorting of the bulbs for color or flower form, and since it was the last day, I got something like 200 bulbs (including daffodils) for $10. I should count and see how many flowers I actually got, because I wonder how many of the 200 didn’t work. They were the small leftovers, so they weren’t in the best shape.
Anyway, I also planted these pansies in the fall. I don’t know why pansy means weakling, because these flowers are tough! They live under the snow and through -7 degree weather and come back in late winter with awesome color. They make a nice cover under the tulips. Here are some more photos of some of the tulips. A few are quite unusual varieties, like these yellow ones. Normally, I’d prefer to plant tulips in bunches of similar colors, but I think this mixed bed doesn’t look too bad.
I leave mine in the ground, too. The folks at Temple Square don’t want to take any chances and need a fabulous display each year, so they start over from scratch each year. That’s partly because some tulips can be lost in the summer because the bulbs would rather go completely dry over the summer, but if they’re in a bed that you water for other summer flowers, they can rot or suffer some milder damage.
A lot of people notice that their tulips decline in quality in subsequent years, but that can be avoided to some extent by making sure you fertilize the plants after the blooms fall off and let the green leaves live until they start to brown and shrivel up in early summer. Those leaves are feeding energy back into the bulbs for next year’s display. Once those leaves shrivel, you can cut them off.
Are you planning to take the bulbs out for the summer or just leave them in? I planted a bunch myself last fall and was hoping they were set for a few years at least. The temple square gardening story you linked to on GardenWeb says to take them out (and they don’t reuse them mostly).
They are the Ultima Morpho variety, and I bought the plants last fall — probably at Wal-Mart or Home Depot, but I can’t remember. Looking up some info on them, I see that they are “extremely heat tolerant” so maybe they’ll last longer into the summer than the ones I tried last year (they made it to July, I think).
I haven’t tried pansies from seed, although I hear they aren’t too hard to grow.
Those pansies are beautiful! Did you plant them from seed? What kind are they?