36 BULLETIN 1082, TJ. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
California northward. Successes have been had in Michigan. Good 
bulbs have been grown on a small scale in Virginia, New York, Ver- 
mont, and Ohio. One success is recorded in southwestern Missouri, 
although confessedly under difficult y and only with Darwins and 
late tulips. Many more illustrations might be cited, but the above 
are sufficient to prove the contention that the crop is quite adaptable. 
The main requisites are, first of all, a soil that does not bake, 
plenty of moisture, good drainage, and a not too rapid transition 
from winter to summer. 
ENEMIES OF TULIPS. 
If the tulip grower observes the rules of ordinary sanitation and 
good culture and rotates his crops so as not to get back on the same 
ground with tulips oftener than once in three years he seldom need 
worry about diseases. The tulip is remarkably free from pests. 
The popular notion that mysterious scourges come along and wipe 
out the crop is fallacious. Even a bulb so badly injured that it can 
not make root is often not lost. There is frequently a good, uninjured 
bud which will commonly round off into a perfectly healthy but 
small bulb which can be grown so as to give a normal progeny again. 
Often bulbs have been seen so injured by molds or poor drainage in 
winter and early spring that they died down four weeks before their 
time but left a perfectly healthy bulblet, although only a tenth of the 
size of the original. 
The most serious enemy of the tulip bulb is the bulb house. Here 
all sorts of abuses are practiced which may lead to disaster, but the 
rots and the molds of the bulb house are no more diseases of the tulip 
than the same rots and molds are diseases of bread and pastry in the 
kitchen pantry. Of course, if the moisture conditions are not under 
proper control, bulbs in piles will rot, but so will wheat and corn, and 
it may be said that a properly cured tulip bulb with its coat on is 
about as effectively protected from fungi, either saprophytic or 
parasitic, as a grain berry. If the coats are abraded and the bulbs 
bruised, of course, the ordinary black and blue molds will find 
ingress and do great injury, but this is also true of potatoes. 
Second to the " bulb-house pest" should be mentioned the fire dis- 
ease, caused by the mold Botrytis. (PL VII, Fig. 2.) This is really 
the only disease of consequence which has affected tulips in this 
country. This saprophytic mold under certain favorable conditions 
is capable of becoming a real parasite, attacking and destroying living 
tissues. 
When this disease appears in the bulb fields, little can be done to 
check its progress. It is said that the Hollander drives stakes around 
a focus of infestation and stretches muslin to prevent the spores being 
spread by the wind to healthy foliage, but it has never been thought 
that such a remedy was practicable in any attack observed by the 
