Pretty pictures: Tulipa cvv.

I'd pretty much thought that the last batch of tulip photos would be it, but they keep coming up, and I keep taking pictures of them, so I have another batch to show. Plus, everybody likes tulips. So.

This first one I really like: it's pink and orange at the same time. I've seen them in a couple different places around town.


And then another flower of the same (?) variety, from a different garden:


It took me forever to get a decent picture of a yellow tulip. They're all over the place, but people have this thing about planting yellow tulips right next to their house, usually under a window, and I do not want to have any conversation which begins with the question "Why are you standing outside my five-year-old daughter's bedroom window with a camera?"


I see a lot of purple tulips around town too, but mostly they seem to be going for a darker, more somber kind of purple. Nothing wrong with that, but this guy's lighter hue stands out and seems somehow more appropriate to the season.


And yet another reddish one. It isn't the greatest photo; it was overcast when I took it, and the colors all wound up kind of washed-out. I did the best I could to get them more or less the way they appeared in person, but it kind of didn't work.


Only a couple houses have "black" (actually more of a very dark red-purple) tulips. This particular one is planted in a tire, which you can kind of see in the photo, along with some Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica). The combination works surprisingly well, in part because the color of the tulips and the color of their "planter" echo one another. This is possibly the first "black" tulip I've seen since reading about them in Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire. (I bought some 'Queen of Night' bulbs in the fall of 2007, along with some hyacinths and maybe something else, for a planter on the landing outside our apartment door, but nothing came up; I never figured out why.) They are, indeed, pretty dark.


"Parrot" "Fringed" tulips, those with fringed petals, don't seem to be very popular: this is the only one I've seen so far.


And, finally, another sighting of the highly-coveted (by me) viridiflora tulips. (I've actually seen one other one, a white one, but didn't take a picture because it was deep in someone's yard and Sheba can be trusted not to trample stuff only up to a point.)


In this particular case, I even know the cultivar name, because the tag happened to be there. This is Tulipa 'Greenland.' Of more interest to me than the name is how and why the tag happened to be there. (It looked like it was just lying there on the ground, not stuck upright into the soil. Except there's no way it could have just been laying there since last fall, not after the wind and the rain and everything. But if it had recently been dropped there, that doesn't make any sense either, because why would you put the identifying tag for a plant down after the plant had already come up and bloomed and was obviously whatever it was? Isn't that when you least need a tag telling you what the plant is? And even if you were going to try to mark the spot, you'd still want to push it into the soil vertically to keep it from blowing away, right? So it's a mystery.)