On Apr 25, 2006, at 12:05 PM, Merrill Jensen wrote: > Do you have any other species growing without any special care down > there? > I'm doing my early research for and Pacific Hort article on species > tulips > and am looking for more that do well without any chilling. I've only tried a few Tulips species, and the absolute star of the show for no chilling and in fact no care whatsoever is the T. clusiana/clusiana var chrysantha family and cultivars (Sheila, Peppermint Stick, Lady Jane, Tinka, Tubergens' Gem, Cynthia, etc.). These just increase and increase year after year and bloom without fail every year. No special care or soil or watering regimen or anything. T. bakeri 'Lilac Wonder' is nearly as good. We like it the best however because it looks the most like the Dutch style tulip hybrids of all the ones I grow. Every once in a while it skips a year of blooming. T. saxatilis does well too. I'm no expert, so I can't see a big difference. T. 'Little Princess' and 'Little Beauty' bloom every year and are almost as good as the clusiana family except that they don't multiply as quickly nor are as vigorous as the clusiana are. Always plenty of blooms in the spring. When I read that the parents of one or the other (or both?) of these were T. aucheriana and T. hageri var. splendens, I got some of both and have been growing them for a few years. Neither is as good as the two 'Little' hybrids, and I haven't gotten hageri to bloom even though it leafs out and multiplies. T. aucheriana doesn't bloom as well as the hybrids but at least it blooms now and then. It's interesting that the hybrids do better in this climate for me than either of the parent species. I've tried T. sylvestris, but it never endures. This may be because it doesn't like growing in pots for more than a few seasons. T. tarda (dasystemon) is also supposed to not require chilling either, but it only does as well as sylvestris for me. Maybe it hates pots, too. Finally, Charles Hardman (former president of IBS) swears by T. wilsoniana. They don't so as well for me, although they do bloom every other year on average. I think I'm not growing them correctly because they haven't exactly thrived in my growing conditions. Maybe it's the soil mix I use or something. Harold Koopowitz says the annoying thing about all the hybrid tulips the Dutch have developed over the centuries is that, had they done it differently, we could have had the same breadth of flower colors, forms, etc., but with perfectly mediterranean-growing ability--since so many of the original source species do just fine in mediterranean climates. But they only cared what would survive outside in Holland and thus got hundreds and thousands of cultivars that won't grow in So. Calif. (or Texas, etc.) without pre-chilling in the refrigerator and dying out after blooming. --Lee Poulsen Pasadena, California, USDA Zone 10a