I missed tulip mania by several centuries, but somehow I caught the bug anyway.
It all goes back to Joan McClure.
She was a former Vogue advertising copywriter who lived in a lovely West Village townhouse with window-boxes that lit up her small block with yellow daffodils each spring. But her real gardening joy was her tulips, which she grew in a neat U-shaped border around a central patch of pea gravel in her townhouse back garden, and which I would come to visit each spring.
My mother met her when they were advocating for an extension of Abingdon Square at the end of the block. Back in the 1980s the traffic triangle near it was all asphalt and car accidents and the closest place to see flowers was in Joan's backyard at her annual Tulip Party. Timed to peak bloom, it was a daytime affair with champagne in flutes, and women in party dresses, and artists and intellectuals and magazine people and the occasional person with real money. It was the first place I tasted sweet-bitter Belgian endive, whose leaves every year were arrayed in circles around a sour cream-based dip. The whole tulip-inspired situation seemed to me the height of elegant living.
Decades later when I found myself residing in Bed-Stuy in my partner’s recently acquired 19th century townhouse, I resolved to try to follow Joan’s inspiration. The yard then was still a total wreck, overgrown with ivy, which turned out to be covering decades of trash and construction debris. We managed to get most of the ivy and trash and rocks hauled out before Covid, along with a first professional trimming of the 23 largely self-planted trees (thank you, Urban Arborists). I ordered a mess of tulip bulbs from Eden Brothers (“the seediest place on Earth”) and a Korean hand plow (good for digging deep holes), marked out a flower bed area with old bricks left over from punching out a second-floor terrace door, and got to work.
Planting perennials is an act of hope. It is an investment in a multi-year story arc. When it comes to perennials, it is said that the first year they sleep, the second they creep, and the third they leap. This is very much the case for peonies, but tulips are a perennial that acts like an annual. You put them in the earth on a cold late fall day, and they cheerfully greet you in the warmth of spring. That first year, they blossomed during New York City’s lonely Covid lockdown; I was so grateful to see them, this living bouquet I’d planted for myself in a previous world, now opening to cheer me as I wheezed through Covid recovery.
Garden-rooted tulips, I soon observed, have significantly more phases than cut ones. They open when they feel the sun, then close up for the night again. Even the most fan-shaped blossom tucks in and holds itself close in the dark. Their colors change day-to-day, too, pinks and oranges redden over time. And in Brooklyn at least, you really have to treat them like annuals and plant a new crop every year, because the squirrels that dig them up all year long will eat the soft sweet hearts out of the juicy bulbs. Those that survive this great gnawing often get beheaded as they bloom; the squirrels lop their tops off to lap nectar from their stems, as if sipping on a straw; sparrows and cardinals follow to peck at the scattered petals and feed them to their nestlings.
Most of my first year's crop were felled by the squirrels, so the next year I expanded to a front yard planter that was less tempting to arboreal rodents. The following year, to a defunct old block association planter in front of the house. I loved watching small children and grown men taking pictures with them when they bloomed, feeling like I was bringing joy to the block. That lasted until one Sunday last year, when I came home to find that all the red ones in the planter had been beheaded. A review of our security camera footage showed the culprit was a young girl. Of course: It was Mother’s Day and she wanted to bring flowers to her mother. My anger melted immediately and I made a mental note to expect this annual end to tulip season. Then the next fall, a man came by at 2am with a rolling cart and a shovel and took most of the earth and bulbs in the planter, so I moved on to planting bulbs in a local community garden that’s locked at night.
This year it was 87 degrees out during peak tulip week. In the front yard, the early-bloomers had one day between opening and being burned to a crisp. In the back, the squirrels finally let the patch near the bench (pictured, above) flower for two days, before snipping down half of them during a dawn foraging session. A bud vase filled with their cuttings is now my daily writing companion.
Planting tulips is an act of hope. And like all planting, it is a lesson in accepting the mess of what you cannot control: the heat, the squirrels, passing children and men with shovels. They are an annual reminder that you do not always reap what you sow. And that the act of putting down roots, over and over, is its own kind of celebration.