We can’t - or at least don’t - always live in the moment. The past is good to revisit sometimes for what it can teach us (you know what they say about hindsight and all) and it’s exciting to cast ahead to the future. Right now I’m slightly single minded about the coming week — I’ll be on vacation!! My bag is packed and I’m waiting by the car.

When I’m not busy picturing myself being supremely lazy, dozing and drooling with a book in my lap, I’m thinking about all I’m going to miss here at Blithewold. Highest on the miss-list is Lilah’s last week here. She, alas, is abandoning us for new adventures in academia. I’ve tried to help her with Worst-Case-Scenario projections - she’s oddly confident that it will all be wonderful… - and she’s taken very many unflattering pictures of me (as payback for the W.C.S’s) and some pretty ones of Gail for her bulletin board. If anyone has any sage advice for Lilah as she starts her first semester at Bard College in New York, please share! We will miss her madly and have already asked her to sign a binding contract to intern again next summer. Perhaps by then she will have changed her mind re. ornamental vegetables. College can be a mind-blowing experience after all…

I imagine that I’ll miss a lot in the gardens as well and have taken the befores pictures to compare with the afters I’m back. If I had been away this week instead I would have been so surprised by Fred and Dan’s newest structural addition in the Display Garden. Not 10 minutes after the guys finished installation, visitors were already ogling and photographing it. I haven’t asked if Fred has a name for his creation but to me it’s like looking at a hive in cross section…

And when I get back I’ll have to be at least a little more mentally prepared to acknowledge and accept Julie Morris’ (our Director of Horticulture) impending retirement. She might be ready but I’m for sure not. More on that much later.

For now, this week we are looking forward all the way to spring. It’s time to order bulbs! We cut the pictures out of the Scheepers catalog and played them like a high stakes card game. We came up with several combination selections that we think would be winning in the North Garden and many must haves for the Rose and Cutting Gardens. It will be up to Gail and Lilah to make the final cut next week. I hope they choose my North Garden “hand”! How do you play your bulb choices?

And what are you looking forward to? I’ll be looking forward to finding out when I get back! Have a great week, everyone!

I think we outdid ourselves with tulips this year - we planted 300 (Angelique and Cool Crystal) in and around the Rose Garden and 600 (Cistula, Blushing Beauty, Black Hero and Creme Upstar) in the North - not to mention a cutting bed full of them. And they were spectacular! It was the perfect tulip year: They didn’t get eaten by the deer, they started blooming just as the daffodils were going by and they hung on … and on … and on! As a matter of fact some of them were still blooming today. I say “were blooming” because this morning we dug them up and they are now in a sort of organized heap right behind my chair in the potting shed.

For us, tulips in the North and Rose Gardens act as glorious spring place holders for summer annuals and tender perennials. It works clockwork perfectly - when the annuals come out in the fall, we put the tulips right in - the soil is pillow soft and easy; and come spring, just as the tulips are going by, it’s time to plant the annuals. Every year we buy new tulips for those gardens to make sure the show is as stunning as possible and rotate the past year’s to the cutting beds for one more go. Reduce -Add more! Reuse! Recycle! That’s our motto!

Ideally we would wait for the foliage to wither before digging the bulbs out but we don’t have that kind of time - we want to start planting next week! So we dug them leaving the foliage on to dry out and feed the bulbs for another couple of weeks and piled them in a dry place out of the sun (our “office” incidentally). Some rainy day in a couple/three weeks we’ll remove the stalks and paperbag the bulbs for summer storage in the pot cubbies which is as cool, dark and dry a place as we have here.

I’m debating about digging up the tulips in my own garden. On the one hand they are all in patches that I could more easily fill to the gills with annuals if I took the bulbs out first. On the other hand (she had five fingers) I could take my chances on losing a few to the spade, competition and over watering and save myself the trouble of fussing with storage issues. I’ll plant more in the fall either way… What do you do with your tulips?