Tulips

[hollyisalovelyname]

The blooms on my outdoor tulips have died. Do I cut them down to the soil or leave them?

Pull off the flowers/seed heads, but leave the leaves there, as they will be making energy to store in the bulbs for next year. You could give them a feed with a general purpose plant food.

Thank you

You're very welcome!

That advice goes for pretty well all bulbs I think. Tulips may be less easy than daffs or crocus for example, and will suffer if soil is too heavy or wet.

If you have snowdrops they will benefit from being lifted, divided and replanted to give them more space. Crocus also CAN be divided, but they aren't as happy about it as snowdrops!

Hardy cyclamen are very easy, and seed from ripe 'capsules' can be scattered around to multiply them.

Remove tulip leaves once they've turned yellow, don't let them rot into the soil as this can encourage a disease called tulip fire the following year.

Yes, I would only keep feeding the leaves (of tulips or anything else) while they look green and healthy. I tend to chop all bulb leaves off (apart from the fine leaves of snowdrops) once they look yellow and shrivelled.

What they all said. Tulips are a bit hit and miss in terms of how well they come back ime - and Monty Don says to think of them as annuals so it's not just me The more traditionally tulip shaped ones seem to fare better in my garden in terms of repeat performance.

Yes, even in pots I find they dwindle after about the second or third year. I have just failed to find it online, but in the Telegraph/Sunday Telegraph gardening section a weekend or two ago, Sarah Raven had written a piece about the best tulips to treat as perennials. I can't remember them all, but Ballerina and Spring Green were on the list.

Interesting - I've not had consistent results with Spring Green after the first year (they are wonderful that first year though)

If you look at SR's website - which is where my Google search took me - she markets various tulips as "perennials". My miserly/lazy instincts mean I don't like renewing the pots of tulips every year, but Carol Klein too recommends treating them as annuals so that probably is the way to go. I have, though, had good results with pots of Prinzes Irene, which went on for several years before finally this year dwindling to nothing.