Tulips welcome the spring

The bright reddish pink tulips have grown tall this spring, and also somehow avoided having their heads hacked off by animal or child. One set even survived a late season transplantation.

The purple tulips are a latee blooming variety. They were so close last week. Soon they will open.

Tulip carnage

Animal damage or rainstorm damage? What do you think?

It seems suspicious that only red tulips suffer this damage. That makes me think it is an agent of some sort like a squirrel. On the other hand, one might contend that red tulips are inherently more likely to be damaged by rain due to a weakness in the plant tied to the color (breeding red plants breeds weak plants, for instance).

I just want them to survive to flower and be pretty to look at.

Spring flowers bring out the bleeding hearts, and others

Spring flowers for a rainy day.

I thought I would take pictures of these tulips before they even bloom since the squirrels will soon whack the heads off of them one by one.

A hyacinth closeup looking dizzyingly downward.

The squirrels don't bother the white tulips. These are in a different part of the yard. This photo is peering down the center of a fully open flower.


These daffodils are doing even better this year than last.


The grape hyacinths are blooming from the top down so the tops look lighter, but the bottoms really look like grapes.

This bleeding heart (Dicentra spectabilis) has come back year after year even with neglectful treatment. So far it has only one flower on it.

The Tulips that survived

After the horror that has befallen many of the tulips this year, I don't want to leave the impression that none survived. Here is a sampling. It seems that white tulips are less offensive to the squirrels in our yard than red ones. This is completely confounded by the huge bunches of red tulips in our neighbors' gardens.

Tulip carnage

We planted loads of tulips in the Fall with the expectation of glorious flowers in the Spring. They all started beautifully and then in the course of a few days something ripped or chewed off the top of everyone that was close to the house. The tops are usually scattered nearby, not eaten. The only survivors are the white ones down the driveway. The neighbors had no such problems.

Do any of the gardeners out there know what happened or have had a similar experience? We do not have deer in our yard but we lots of squirrels and we have some raccoons that come by at night. Lynn even tried putting hot pepper sauce on the remaining ones, but they were taken out the next day.

The tulip carnage is horrific.