So, the last of the tulips are now in flower, but impatient gardeners who want to focus on their summer blooms may be debating whether to lift the tulips that have finished blooming, or leave the bulbs in the ground in the hope they’ll come back next year. So, what do you do? Richard Wilford, horticulturist and head of garden design and collection support at the Royal Botanic Gardens , Kew , and author of The Plant Lover’s Guide To Tulips (Timber Press), says it depends on your soil and the variety of tulip. They need free-draining soil “At Kew we have very free-draining soil, that is quite sandy below the soil surface and drains really quickly.
“We do leave tulips in the ground and they do come back but if you’ve got heavier soil or clay soil then they probably won’t survive the summer. “They need a dry summer, which is why a lot of people lift them when they have started to die down and then store them somewhere cool and dry ready to replant in the autumn,” he says. Some varieties fare better than others “There are different groups of tulips.
I find the lily flower tulips a bit more resilient. They tend to come back. We’ve got Tulipa ‘Ballerina’ at Kew which has come back several years.
“You’ve also got the Fosteriana hybrids. So, Tulipa Fosteriana is the species and there’s a whole range of hybrids that are bred and still have a lot of Fosteriana in them and are much more likely to come back year after year.” Other groups such as 6and Greigi.
