Succulents and More™

We can grow many things in zone 9b, but for some plants, our winters are too mild . This includes tulips. Hybrid tulips, in particular — the showy, often gaudy and over-the-top kind. Sure, you can buy tulip bulbs in any nursery or garden center at this time of year, but the odds of success are middling at best. The reason is that hybrid tulips need a long, consistent cold period to trigger the hormonal process that develops flower buds. Even pre-chilled bulbs, sold at a premium, typically decline after a few years even if you do everything right: lift them at the end of spring, keep them dry all summer, and then put them in the fridge in September for 8 or 10 weeks before planting them out again. Tulip house in Victoria, British Columbia. A common sight in many places, you’d never see a sea of tulips in mild-winter California. Species tulips, or wild tulips, are a different story. They are the original, naturally occurring ancestors found in a vast region stretching from the Mediterran...

Our climate is great for tomatoes, lavender, subtropical bamboos and of most cacti and succulents, but it sucks for those beloved harbingers of spring that once almost brought the Dutch economy to its knees : tulips. To get tulips to bloom at all, we need to chill them in the fridge or buy pre-chilled bulbs. Forget about them coming back the next year—our summer heat does them in. So it is with great envy that I look at photos of tulip fields in Holland or Washington State. Tulip field in the Netherlands Photo source: Wikipedia Tulip field in the Skagit Valley, Washington State Photo source: Wikipedia