Garden Tips for Buying the Best Cold Hardy Flower Bulbs to Plant Outdoors

Buying flower bulbs to plant and grow is an exciting experience that begins in the fall and continues through the spring. Dutch flower bulbs are generally delivered to American ports in the month of September for fall planting. Top Dutch bulb offerings include Dutch amaryllis and African amaryllis; daffodil bulbs and the famous tulip bulbs.

Amaryllis flower bulbs grow the most showy flowers and are pre-cooled to force a rapid bloom within 3 weeks after being packed in containers. Dutch Amaryllis bulb importers offer a wider variety of selections and more bulbs to entice buyers. African Amaryllis bulb growers appear to be enslaved by the distribution network of Dutch Amaryllis importers, yet the African flowers emerging on Amaryllis stems are superior in many respects to Dutch amaryllis. African Amaryllis flowers appear to offer lighter colors, more compact flower stalks, leaves that grow as the flowers appear, and more numerous flower stalks that grow from smaller bulbs. The wide variety of amaryllis bloom colors include red, pink, lavender, orange, yellow, white, green, maroon, red stripe, white stripe, pink stripe, and bicolor. Double the petals on Amaryllis flowers are growing rapidly to be very popular options to buy, as the petal count increases to 12, instead of the 6 that grow on most Amaryllis bulb flower stems, looking very similar to a huge carnation flower.

Daffodil flower bulbs are important Dutch bulbs for fall planting, due to their reasonable market cost, ease of planting, and the growth of flower stalks in the spring in various colors of yellow, white, orange, and the rare pink daffodil. Daffodil bulbs are easy to naturalize to re-bloom each year.

Tulip bulbs are a native plant to Turkey, but Dutch bulb growers have long hybridized tulips on a commercial scale. The cost of Dutch tulips has not always been cheap, but today’s tulip buyers still love the colors of spring flowers: red, pink, orange, yellow, blue, purple, white, and bi-color. Cities and government organizations eagerly purchase tulip bulbs in bulk during the winter seasons to grow into beautiful landscape displays during the spring.

The rhizome of the Canna lily has long been considered tropical in nature, with very little resistance to cold. The first American botanist and explorer, William Bartram, wrote in his book Travels, in 1773, the discovery of Canna indica in Alabama near Mobile, “Canna indica amazes with its exuberance, presents a glorious spectacle, the stem rises six, seven , and nine feet high, ending up with spikes of scarlet flowers. ” Bartram also discovered native Canna flaccida, which grows near Fort Frederica, Georgia, located on St Simon’s Island. Canna lilies colors are broad, red, white, pink, lavender, orange, yellow, mottled, bi-colored, and others. Some Canna flower growers plant cannas with varied leaf shapes that are streaked with red, green, yellow, white, and pink. Dutch canna rhizome dealers continue to flood retail stores and garden centers with poor quality “Victorian era” canna bulbs; varieties that had declined, “sold out”, 50 years ago, and should have been discontinued and not presented to buyers at a garden center nursery.

Ginger lily rhizomes grow flowers with fragile, delicate blooms, many of which look like miniature orchid blooms. The foliage of ginger lilies is interesting, growing in colors of green, yellow, maroon, and stripes of yellow or white. Interest in planting ginger lilies has grown in 20 years, due to the realization that many ginger lilies are cold hardy and survive temperatures as low as zero degrees F. The foliage and flowers are pleasantly aromatic.

Daylilies are not actually bulbs but rhizomes, but they are widely sold as daylily bulbs. Thousands of named varieties of Daylily bulbs have been easily hybridized by legions of backyard gardeners and the improvement in flower selection and quality is absolutely astonishing. The improvement has resulted in the cultivation of double-flowered day lilies, miniature day lilies, cold hardy day lilies, and compact or large day lilies plants. It is amazing to realize all these colors: red, white, yellow, orange, purple, pink and bicolor that originated from an original native plant, a seedy yellow lily that grows wild on the edge of the forest.

Crinum Lily bulbs offer the more adventurous or gardener a selection of vintage garden bulbs that have been reintroduced as crinum clones enhanced by the brilliant inductivity of chemist Lester Hannibal of Fair Oaks, California. Lester Hannibal crossed and interbred many native species of crinum lilies to offer the gardener an excellent, cold-hardy crinum, an “interspecific hybrid,” that can be grown as far north as Philadelphia, PA, zone 6, and to survive frost. intense below. zero temperatures. Many of Lester Hannibal’s crinum flower hybrids were a recreation of outdated but popular commercial crosses that were made by Cecil Houdyshel in the 1930s, but greatly improved over the original “Powellii” forms with light colors. , white and pink, an increase in the number of flowers in the umbel, prolonged flowering periods, elimination of fallen flowers, fragrance intensification and early flowering after sprouting from seed germination. The crinum “milk and wine” lilies were named because the flowers were white (milk) and streaked with wine color. The Crinum colors are burgundy, red, pink, white, greenish yellow, and orange. Crinum bulbs increase when growing in groups of multiple displacements from the central mother bulb, or when planting the seed of some cultivars or species.

– Rare and hard to find flower bulbs on merit – Many rare minor flower bulbs are not available to buy anywhere except possibly by exchanging plants with collectors and hobbiest. The Amazon lily, Encharist grandiflora, blooms with six white, daffodil-like petals and a bright green or yellow cup radiating from the center. This delicate flower can be remembered from days gone by for its wonderful and charming fragrance. The Bird of Paradise is known for the two tropical forms, the Strelizia reginae, the most common: brightly colored flowers with bright orange, red and blue blooms; and Strelizia nicholae, which grows with large, showy white flowers. The blood lily, Scadoxus mutliflorus, forms globular flowers the size of a baby’s head with petals of red filaments and radiates fragile threads of red that adhere to the center of the flower, ideal for growing in containers. The red butterfly lily, Odontonema strictum, won Florida’s Perennial of the Year award in 2000, and butterflies and hummingbirds flock to visit the fiery red spikes, beginning in mid-August and continuing through the first hard frost. The calla lily, Calla palustrus, has been hybridized with many other calla lily species to grow in many splendid colors, but the new hybrids are not as popular as the white, fragrant, winter-blooming Calla aethiopica; and the yellow cove, Calla aethiopica. Clivia lilies, Clivia minata, are chosen plants that require lots of shade and produce giant clusters of orange, cup-shaped flowers with a yellow throat and often re-bloom two or three times from large bulbs. .

Gloriosa lilies, Gloriosa rothschildiana, a vine that is dressed in curved, star-shaped flowers that are favored and admired by florists and flower arrangers, because the flowers last very well. The Inca lily, Alstomeria aurantiaca, has become naturalized in America, as a bulb escaped from the tropical jungles of Peru. Alstromeria flowers last well as a cut flower, and the greenish-red waxy funnels begin to bloom vigorously in the spring. Lycoris are a lovely group of flower bulbs called “Spider Lily”, and they bloom in floral colors of pink, yellow, white and red, Lycoris radiata, which is the most widely cultivated. The pineapple lily, Eucomis bicolor, grows into flowers that are shaped like miniature pineapple fruits in rusty white and red colors. Scilla flower bulbs are grown in large numbers as bedding plants, many Dutch varieties are small and make good cut flowers, but the best cold hardy Scilla is the Scilla peruviana which forms and grows in bright purplish blue flowers. They grow as well as bedding plants or container plants. Voodoo lilies, Amorphophallus bulbifer, are bizarre, bazaar-leaved and flowering bulbous plants in both leaves and flowers, with an appearance suggestive of snakes, cobras, and other vermin that may lurk beneath the menacing leaves with speckles of leopard. Zephyranthes is called “rain lilies” and blooms softly in colors of pink, Zephyranthes grandiflora; yellow, Zephyranthes citrina; white, Zephyranthes atamasco; and a staggering number of crossbred Zephyranthes bulbs being distributed by a retired breeder in San Antonio, Texas, who apparently has nothing better to do than paralyze all the world’s most serious taxonomists in the task of gathering their records. Mexican-Americans. bulb-children lineage in an amazing encyclopedia publication.

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