This is Tulipa clusiana ‘Lady Jane,’ and she’s a good example of downsizing. Even though I know in my head that when a catalog says a tulip only grows 10 inches tall, the flower is going to be smaller than the big ol’ Darwins in my garden, I somehow can’t help my heart from thinking the flowers will be big. Huge. I mean, they look so pretty in the photos, you know?
But species tulips are shy, and ‘Lady Jane’ is a charmer. The flowers are only about the size of my thumb. The colors aren’t flamboyant; the white is creamy, the red shades a little to purple. It’s not the sort of flower you stand up and take notice of. Rather, it’s the sort you admire for its grace, its sense of proportion, the way those smaller flowers fit so perfectly with the scant foliage and slim stem.
It’s hard to figure out how to use species tulips, because they are so unassuming. I’ve kept them to my front garden bed, amongst other short stuff, like the grape hyacinths that are blooming right now and a tulip called ‘Sorbet’ that’s white with soft yellow stripes–or is it the other way around? I keep the colors muted, so nothing gets blown away. And I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again–if your garden is public, or rather, open to the public (mine butts right up against a sidewalk where hundreds of kids walk on their way to school), these little gems are a lot less likely to get broken off for kicks than their bigger, bolder brethren. It’s one of the reasons I keep growing such shy little ladies.
Photo by Scott Zona licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
Lavender & Larkspur 
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