Plant of the Week
Greigi Tulip
Latin: Tulipa greigii
This spring, the most spectacular bulb in our display garden on campus has
been Tulipa greigii, one of the species tulips. I have a love-hate
relationship with tulips. I love their beauty in the garden, but I hate the fact
that they are so fleeting in both their length of display and intolerant of the
conditions our Arkansas gardens provide.
But all gardeners must come to grips with the fleeting nature of beauty and
perfection, and perhaps it is this very quest that keeps us hooked on our chosen
hobby.
Tulipa greigii is a short, squatty tulip usually under 14 inches tall
with long, pointed, blocky flower buds almost 4 inches long. As the sun strikes
the plant, the flower buds splay open like a waterlily but close tight as the
temperature cools at night. The colors vary from orange-scarlet to cream or
yellow. Bicolor selections with broad contrasting swaths are common and seem to
be a favorite with tulip breeders.
The foliage is distinctive with a series of brown to maroon stripes running
the length of the blade, making this species the easiest to identify of all
tulip species. Like other tulips, the leaves die down by the first hot days of
summer.
This tulip was the first species tulips introduced into cultivation directly
from the wild. It first flowered in European gardens in 1871 from bulbs
collected by a German living in the Central Asian town of Taskent, Uzbekistan.
This city sits on the edge of the great Central Asian steppe about 150 miles
north of the northern Afghan border.
The German, P. L. Graeber and his wife, came into the region shortly after
the Russian army wrested control of the sector from their Arab neighbors in
1865. The Russians maintained control over the region until the breakup of the
USSR in 1992.
Russia=s move into Asia was a
reaction to the footholds that European governments, especially England, were
gaining in China through the treaties signed after the Opium Wars. Her move was
overland, not by sea as for the Europeans, so intervening territories were
gobbled up out of necessity to clear the past to the prize of control of China.
The Greigi Tulip was named by Eduard Regel who was director of the St.
Petersburg Botanic Garden, then the center of scientific research in Russia. He
named the plant in honor of the president of the Russian Horticultural Society.
In the fine gardens and estates of Europe the cultivated tulip cultivars were
suffering a decline in popularity. They were passe, and gardeners lost interest
in the gaudy hybrids that the breeders in Holland were mass producing. The
arrival of the species tulips coincided with a new gardening fad sweeping
Europe, rock gardening. A kind of horticultural elitism developed where
wildlings were highly treasured while mundane cultivars were shunned.
The Greigi Tulip and its cultivars are more lasting in our gardens than
typical hybrid tulips because they are slow to produce offsets. Each spring as
the bulb renews itself, it does not have the numerous daughter bulbs to nourish
so the main bulb remains relatively large.
The bulbs should be sited in a location where they get good winter drainage
and a good, thorough baking in the summer. Too much moisture during the summer
prevents these desert-dwellers from properly curing to ward off the attack of
soil-rotting microbes.
By: Gerald Klingaman, retired
Extension Horticulturist
- Ornamentals
Extension News -
April 19, 2002
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