Spring is coming.
Even though it’s early fall, now is the time to think about the premier icon of spring, the floral harbinger recognized around the world as a vernal signpost—the tulip. Showy, vivid, distinctive, and reliable, tulips are simple to grow.
But not necessarily easy.
“Plant them in October, dig the bulbs back up in June,” explained Brent Roozen, third-generation descendant of the man who became America’s tulip tycoon after founding what is now North America’s biggest tulip grower. The Roozen family fields grow around 30 million tulip bulbs, as well as millions of daffodils, irises, and lilies.
Standing by one of his family’s display fields on a warm, midsummer day in Washington’s Skagit Valley, an hour north of Seattle, Mr. Roozen grinned wryly at the way the field illustrates the seasonal rhythm of tulip-growing: It’s acres of bare, beige dirt. There are no flowers, no plants, not a green growing frond of anything, because every bulb in what was a red-and-white-and-yellow tapestry two months ago has been dug up, hauled away, sorted, and boxed, and is curing in massive warehouses several hundred yards south of here.
Deep Roots
The Roozens have been growing tulips here since Brent’s grandfather William emigrated from the Netherlands to the United States in 1947, bringing with him a family history of tulip growing that dates back to the 1700s.
Holland is famously the home of humanity’s first market bubble mania, when a single tulip bulb was briefly worth as much as a mansion in Amsterdam in the 1600s. Then the price collapsed, and investors lost their shirts—but not their bulbs, and tulip production remains a mainstay of Dutch enterprise. A small influx of Dutch emigrants seeking new farm territory after World War II brought the trade to the Skagit Valley, and William Roozen was among them.
The family farms about 2,000 acres; up to 1,000 acres of that are devoted to 150 (among 5,000 or so) varieties of tulips, while barley, wheat, other flowers, and fallow-field crops such as clover occupy the rest. RoozenGaarde seems like a huge expanse to the tens of thousands of visitors who admire its colorful-quilt fields arrayed in April against the Cascades, but it’s actually just a tiny fraction of the whole.
During peak season in spring, the company employs 300 workers, of whom about a dozen are Roozen family members. Despite the vast size of its operations, the family adheres to some old-school flower agriculture strategies. Bulbs (yes, the many millions) are inspected by hand on sorting lines, and the Roozens have so far resisted the ag industry’s migration to sorting and grading by robotic scanners. Nor do the Roozens farm out their planting and harvest functions to third-party companies, as do many massive bulb growers in Holland.
“Growing up, I never thought for a single second that I would be growing tulips during my adult lifetime,” Mr. Roozen said. “And then I was asked to help out for a season, which turned into a year, which turned into my adult life, and now I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
Ironically, “Roozen” in Dutch means roses.
“Roses are nice,” Mr. Roozen said. “But I’ll stick with my professional title: tulip grower.”
An honorable title indeed, one that heightens the beauty of life on this planet.
“It’s amazing the joy the tulips bring just by being there for us to admire,” added Cindy Verge, executive director of the Skagit Tulip Festival. “Tulips are things of beauty, and they don’t ask anything of us except appreciation.”
In the Garden: How To Grow the Icons of Spring
Plant, wait, watch, unplant. Tulip growing is that simple.First domesticated in the mountain foothills of Turkey centuries ago, modern tulips still bear the horticultural preferences of their Ottoman ancestors. You could lose your life for taking one of the emperor’s bulbs from his Istanbul garden; today, if you ignore protocols, you may just lose your tulip bulbs.
The key is the calendar. While tulips have a broad range geographically—they are grown in climates from Alaska to Texas in the United States—their horticultural requirements are quite specific everywhere: winter chill, cool spring moisture, followed by early summer drying and curing. Across most of the non-tropical Northern Hemisphere, following the tulip’s calendar inherently meets its horticultural requirements.
Buying
Choose the varieties you want (there are many hundreds); make sure you order them in late summer; and remember, the larger the bulb, the larger the flower (big bulbs are 15 to 20 centimeters), though smaller bulbs can produce nice blooms, too.
Planting
Get the bulbs in the ground in mid-October. Tulip bulbs never go fully dormant, so they deteriorate if not planted in autumn. “If you take 100 good stored bulbs in October, if they aren’t planted, by December you’ll have 90, and at the end of January it’ll just be 50 if they’re still above ground,” Brent Roozen explains.Plant 4 to 6 inches deep, depending on the bulb size, close together (2 inches apart) for mass color effect or farther apart for cutting. Since they are in the ground over the winter, no watering is needed unless you are in an exceptionally arid location. Fertilizer is not needed, either, unless you have very poor soil.
Unplanting
After they’re done blooming in the first sunny days of April into May, let the bulbs cure underground in the drying ground of late spring, dig them up when the plant foliage disappears, and store them in a box in the garage until the cycle begins again next October. “We know it’s a lot to ask our customers to dig up every tulip every summer,” Mr. Roozen concedes. So why not just leave them in the ground? That’s fine only if they are not in a bed with other plants that you’ll water through the summer, which can rot your tulip bulbs while helping other plants thrive.Digging and storing bulbs is a bit of work, but gardening is a hands-on endeavor, and the result is one of nature’s premier flowers.
