TULIP-TIME 
is as distinctive and characteristic 
a season in the garden as rose-time, daffodil-time, or that short season when 
the burnished hues of the chrysanthemums warn us that the show is nearly over for the 
year. Tulips are, indeed, the crown of the May garden. Lilacs of many hues may wave their perfumed plumes, 
the sweet viburnum scent the air, dogwoods, apples, crabapples, flowering almond and spiraea may line 
their dark branches with lovely bloom, and a thousand flowers blow in the borders, but in some manner, 
like royalty, perhaps, the tulip holds itself apart and is easily supreme. 
And the amazing thing is that the flower is so simple in form, a simple cup or vase; it makes no bid for 
admiration by means of intricacies or complexities; it artlessly offers its exquisitely molded chalice on 
a straight, sturdy stem, and all else around it appear fussy and confused. The carven cups of the tulips 
easily dominate all else of their season. A garden full of tulips is a garden endowed with indubitable 
distinction. 
But despite their simplicity their variety is astonishing. Hybridists make new flowers as Paris creates new 
fashions. The flower couturiers have been wise. They have left the lovely form alone and spent their genius 
upon varying its vesture. And what a marvelous piece of work they have done! A modern tulip list puts to 
shame a painter’s palette. Cast your eye over it and you will find no tint or tone missing save the true blues. 
Every color, hue, dye, cast, complexion, shade, chromatism is there. Amidst such wealth we do not even think 
of blue. But there are lilacs from palest mauve to deep royal purple; there are pinks that simply beggar the 
language and the color charts; there are reds and scarlets, maroons that reach towards black, and a full and 
flawless scale of yellows from cream to hottest orange. And besides we have those strange unflowerlike hues 
that are so valuable for house decoration—the fawns, the citrons, tawny fuscous, biscuit, chocolate, beige, russet 
and hazel. And a vast number of chaste white varieties, occasionally with an intriguing selvage of scarlet or 
yellow, sometimes pure and unsullied, with even the anthers white. The soul of a tulip is indeed its clothes. But 
many have, besides, a delicate and purely characteristic fragrance, and these will be sought out by persons who 
love sweet-scented flowers. 
There are a thousand ways to make use of tulips. They may be used in beds, marching in straight array, with a floor 
of some contrasting or harmonizing flower. For this purpose pansies in their great variety may be used, or English 
daisies, wallflowers, anchusa myosotidiflora, bleeding heart, double-flowered arabis, golden alyssum, particularly 
the variety citrinus, violas of all sorts and tints, myosotis, aubrietia, armeria maritima, primroses and polyanthus, 
and many another small thing. 
Or they may be used scattered in generous groups about the borders with other flowers of their season, or brought 
within the same vision scope with some of the flowering shrubs and trees. Let us suggest that rather new shrub kolk- 
witzia amabilis as a companion for some of the off-toned Breeders, the biscuits and fawns and dull browns, that 
are sometimes difficult to deal with in the garden. Then, if you have a low-boughed apple tree, make a plantation of 
tulips near it, preferably in the pink tones; or the mauve and purple kinds are lovely and subtle beneath a Judas 
tree (cercis canadensis). Lilacs offer a whole scale from palest pink and white to darkest and richest purple 
which will harmonize with innumerable tulip tones—yellows, whites, pinks, all the mauves and purples, even 
the scarlets. And besides there are the pink and white dogwoods, reaching down their boughs to take part 
in the lovely tulip assemblages. Anyone with an eye that is an eye at all cannot go far wrong in this 
season of luxuriant beauty, but one with a lively sense for color will revel in the innumerable oppor¬ 
tunities to paint pictures against the expectant earth. 
There is hardly a spot in the garden that will not be improved by the use of these flowers 
that combine glad and glorious colors with a simplicity of form and a dignity 
of carriage that are not rivaled by any other bloom. And they 
come at a season when 
we are ready and thirsty 
for such prodigal love- 
ness. Let us be thankful 
for them. 
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