Longwood Gardens’ tulips will be blooming at their peak this week and next.
The Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, attraction’s famous Flower Walk and Idea Garden feature 200,000 bulbs and more than 80 varieties of tulipsāincluding single blooms, double blooms, and fringed.
Roger Davis, the gardens’ outdoor landscape manager, has an idea about why visiting the flower walk is an annual pilgrimage for many.
“It’s that impactful blast of color all in one place,” He said. “It’s kind of a high maintenance garden where we’re working hard. Our goal is to have as much color as long into the season as possible. “
After other parts of the gardens featuring native plants bloom and go green, the tulips should still be going, he said.
The tulip show
“I like to think the flower garden walk is like the conservatory. It’s like that flower show. It’s just not under glass,” Davis said. “We can’t control the weather. So we have a winter season, whereas the conservatory keeps their flower show going year round.”
Planted in October, the walk and idea garden also showcase other flowers grown from bulbs, including daffodils and hyacinths.
The numbers of the bulbs planted at Longwood increase every few years.
“We can always find some other place to put them,” said Davis, the gardens’ outdoor landscape manager.
He points out, though, that the size of a bulb can make a huge difference in how many are planted.
“Whenever you’re planting grape hyacinths, you know 5,000 of those can take up the area of maybe like 100 tulips because they’re so small and you’re planting them so close,” he said. “So if you do a lot of that, the number can really jump up higher. But we have over the years kind of increased numbers.”
This year Longwood has added planted baskets hanging from poles along the Flower Walk.
“We’ve never done that before,” Davis said. “In these baskets there’s one pansy variety, with Artemesia and foliage Fritillaria that everybody seems to be talking about. It’s kind of a yellow variegated form with an orange flower.”
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The Flower Walk is planted into sections with massed colors mimicking a rainbow,Ā as it has been since the 1970s.
“The first section is the purple. The next section is pinks,” Davis said. “Then we have the circular found in the middle that’s kind of a peachy purple mixture. Then the next border we have isĀ reds, yellows and oranges all mixed together. And then we finish at the end with the white border. So all the white tulips.”
Several sections of the walk are already near peak bloom. Others will come in during the next week, he said.
“So it’s definitely a good time to get here and check it out because with warm temperatures they come and go pretty quickly,” Davis said.
The gardens are open Wednesday through Monday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Gardens open Wednesday to Monday from 10 am to 6 pm. Timed admission tickets required, and reservations for members are required Thursday to Sunday through May 7.
Betsy Price is a Wilmington freelance writer who has 40 years of experience.
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