SEPTEMBER, 1908 
T. Gesneriana var. rosea, has a wild-looking flower 
that is ideal for naturalizing 
florists’ standards as formal, artificial, 
technical. Consequently, there is a great 
popular demand at times for the “simple 
old-time originals,” which connoisseurs, 
despise. To meet this demand the dealers 
catalogue about a dozen varieties of Gesne- 
riana, so that you can get back as near a 
possible to the original scarlet, crimson, rose, 
orange, yellow and white. But when you 
get these rustic varieties in your garden in 
comparison with larger flowers, more varied 
colors and greater refinement of form, your 
loyalty to the “good old timers” begins to 
cool, and the chances are that the next June 
you dig up the bulbs, banish them from the 
garden and put them in the shrubbery, 
orchard or some wild corner 
OUR GREAT NEW OPPORTUNITY 
That is precisely what we all ought to do, 
for we can create gorgeous new effects 
by treating these old tulips-as wild flowers. 
Fancy a thousand red tulips coming up year 
after year in the same meadow and gradually 
multiplying until they become ten thousand! 
And this at a total cost of fifteen dollars, plus 
a day’s work for the original planting! We 
can produce similar pictures in half a dozen 
other colors. There is no cheaper way of 
painting hillsides with color in the spring- 
time, and our great estates can be transformed 
as by a magician’s wand, if country gentlemen 
will plant tulips with as lavish a hand as 
they now plant daffodils. é 
“But,” you may exclaim, ‘‘we can never 
make tulips look like wild flowers. Every- 
one would recognize them at once as exotic, 
because everyone feels instinctively that we 
have no spring wild flower as gorgeous as 
the tulip.” 
Such an objection springs from a fine 
sense of propriety. I shall never advocate 
planting garden tulips in the wild, even 
though they are so cheap that it will be 
impossible for many people to resist the 
temptation. 
THE GARDEN MAGAZINE 
On the other hand, the sharp-petaled 
tulips that have run wild in Europe and 
have maintained themselves for many 
generations without human care are just the 
thing we want in order to give a new life and 
zest to American floriculture. At first 
they will seem strange, but if they like our 
climate and multiply without the slightest 
evidence of human care, the Americans of 
the next generation will assume that they 
are wild flowers, just as the Europeans now 
do. Dozens of the other less interesting 
flowers have already gone through this 
process. 
Probably the most satisfactory purchase 
a man can makein this line is the scarlet tulip 
known as T. Gesneriana, var. spathulata or 
major, because this is the showiest and can 
be had for a cent and a half a bulb by the 
thousand. ‘The flower is three inches long. 
The only other suitable kind that can be 
had so cheaply is I’. Gesneriana, var. rosea. 
The history of these two varieties I cannot 
give, and as the demand increases for tulips 
to be naturalized, I presume that the dealers 
will be tempted to invent a lot of new names 
and pass out any kind of garden tulip of 
the required color which they can supply for 
a cent or two. Clearly such varieties cannot 
59 
compare in interest with the famous old run- 
wild varieties of Europe. It is these histori- 
cal forms of JT. Gesneriana that I now 
propose to describe. 
FIVE BLACK-EYED BEAUTIES 
There is no surer sign of wildness in a 
tulip than the bold black eye formed by the 
spots at the base of the petals. This black 
eye has been bred out of all modern tulips 
by centuries of relentless persecution. The 
reason is that a dark eye generally goes with 
dark stamens and the bursting of the latter 
soon litters the cup of the flower with an 
untidy mass of powder which stains the 
flower a muddy color. 
But when your point of view is that of 
naturalizing tulips on a great scale so as to 
produce a gorgeous sheet of wild flowers, 
these spots become a joyful sign of wildness, 
and they may be black, brown, blue, violet, 
or dark green. 
Add to color the differences in size and 
shape of these spots and you have endless 
material for innocent enjoyment. For, in 
some of these run-wild tulips, the spots are 
so large as to coalesce into one great perfect 
eye, the animation of which is heightened 
by a narrow border of yellow which separates 
A gorgeous array of dark red Gesnerianas that might most happily be grown like wild flowers 
