Glorious Window on the World of Tulips
For nearly half a century, tulips have bloomed in front of this modest Covina home. The first 19 years, they were planted by the home’s owner, a schoolteacher named Rea Viney, who put in a lovely bed beside the house. The home’s next owner, Helen Crawford, has continued and expanded the tradition for 30 years.
This is no small feat, considering how difficult it is to grow tulips well in a climate that is better suited to citrus. But Crawford, who has thoughtfully planned the garden, gets help from her friends. For the past 25 years, each day after Thanksgiving, friends and family plant an amazing 2,300 tulip bulbs. Children who helped when they were young now have children who help plant, and they are joined by Crawford’s children and grandchildren. It only takes a few hours, and by 10 a.m., the garden is planted and ready for another spring. Through the years, this small but spectacular garden has been featured in The Times, Sunset magazine “and in the local paper about 15 times,” Crawford said. Her story has also been included in “Chicken Soup for the Gardener’s Soul,” a compilation of inspiring gardening tales. Flower fever has spread from her garden into many of the neighbor’s frontyards, which are filled this time of the year with all sorts of colorful annuals and bulbs that bloom in spring, though only hers depends mostly on tulips, a plant that is not comfortably at home in Southern California. Getting the display she does takes a lot of work. You can’t simply poke a hole in the ground and plant a tulip.
Crawford, 79, first spotted the French-Norman house with its tulip display years ago while driving through the neighborhood with her daughter. While she was parked on the side of the road admiring the flowers, “a little old lady came out the door waving her cane at us,” recalls Crawford. “She wanted us to get out of the car, scolding, ‘Do you think I’d plant all these tulips, if I didn’t want people to enjoy them?’” They did get out of the car, and she can still remember how pretty the tulips looked. Ten years later, Crawford leaned on her sofa against a newspaper that she normally never reads and saw a headline noting that the “tulip lady” had died. She contacted the heirs and a short while later bought the house in 1972.
Although she’s lived on Palm Drive for 30 years, many still call her home the Viney house. “I keep wondering when they’ll start calling it the Crawford place,” she said with mock chagrin.
Each fall, back when orange-packing houses lined the railroad tracks in Covina, Viney, the daughter of a citrus-growing family, planted about 800 tulip bulbs imported from the Netherlands, under the north-facing front window, where they were lightly shaded by the house. This bed of tulips still exists, but the big show now comes from a border put in by Crawford that parallels the front walk.
Crawford had observed that in fine English gardens, plants aren’t simply placed around the foundation, but also along paths so you can walk beside them. Beds of flowers are much more dramatic when viewed from the ends rather than from the front or sides. Viewed lengthwise, you can’t see the bare dirt between plants. The tulips telescope and appear tightly packed, a trick that works with any plant but particularly with those that are spiky or upright.
It was in England that she also saw the prototype for her boxwood hedge, with its steeply angled sides that are not only dramatic and focusing, but also guarantee that all the leaves get sunshine. And she saw how the English backed up their plantings with deep green shrubs and trees, not the fence or walls of a house. So behind her tulips, along the property line, several shrubs and a spectacular dogwood grow under a huge ginkgo. The deciduous trees lightly shade the tulips from the hot, bleaching sun in spring, then completely shade the beds in summer. The dogwood is a seedling from an old-timer that came with the 1932 house and still grows in the yard.
In the big 10-by-60-foot bed that parallels the front walk, she never plants fewer than 25 tulip bulbs in a group, which partially accounts for the spectacle. Plantings of less than 25 tend “to gray out,” as Crawford puts it. In total, she plants 100 bulbs for each of 23 kinds each year, but some of these are planted in the narrow beds on either side of the walk, two weeks after the big bed is planted. The paving warms the immediate soil just enough to make those bulbs bloom about two weeks earlier, so she must plant them two weeks later if all the tulips are to bloom at once.
These two narrow beds run along each side of the brick entry walk, and the tulip varieties in them are the same as those in the bigger bed--representatives that can be examined closely so that no one is tempted to step into the bed for a better view. Crawford is not particular about the varieties she plants but concentrates on the colors that create the overall picture. For instance, she chose one of the tulips because it was purple and feathered, but she had to check her order to see that it happened to be named ‘Blue Heron’. She’s found that just about any tulip variety grows fine. But in Southern California, tulips are annual flowers; they only last one season.
The beds bloom for about a month, six weeks in some years, because other bulbs such as narcissus and hyacinths bloom just before the tulips and because some of the tulips bloom at slightly different times. “Not many people would be willing to do all this work for a mere month of bloom,” she admits. But then, she loves tulips. And their shapes fill more than the frontyard. Inside her home, tulips are painted on the bathroom walls, where Crawford commissioned a huge mural of Keukenhof Gardens, the famous tulip display garden in the Netherlands. There are tulip frescoes on the bedroom ceiling and abstractions of tulips around the fireplace. There are even stained-glass tulips embedded in the windows. No wonder some call her home the “tulip house.”In this climate, fresh tulip bulbs must be ordered every year. Crawford places her huge order in summer and the bulbs arrive around the first of October. In her garage, she puts the bags of bulbs in an old-fashioned refrigerator that is not frost-free (which would dry out the bulbs). There they sit until planting time at the end of November. This fools the bulbs into thinking they’ve been though a short but cold winter, though one must be careful not to freeze them. Before the planting party arrives, sections of the beds are excavated to a depth of 8 inches. The excavated soil is stacked to the side and organic amendments and bulb fertilizer are mixed into the soil at the bottom of each pit or trench. (It’s a version of the laborious double-digging technique favored by the English, and it seems to be just what tulips like.)
On planting day, Crawford’s friends and family start setting the bulbs in the bottom of the pits and trenches, spacing them about 2 inches apart, “so they are almost touching,” she said. As the areas are filled with bulbs, the youngest children--with the smallest feet--place the last few bulbs, even though “it’s hard to keep children from lining everything up in rows,” said Crawford, who was a psychologist and parenting counselor with the Covina public school system. “That’s what they’re taught to do in the lower grades,” she said, “but we want the bulbs planted more randomly.” Once the bulbs are in place, the pits and trenches are filled in. Then the areas where the excavated soil had been stacked are excavated, prepared and planted.
Whenever the tulips need watering in the winter and spring, the beds are flooded with 1 or 2 inches of water at a time; overhead watering with a sprinkler would destroy the fragile flowers and might even harm emerging leaves. After the big spring bloom, the soil lies fallow for a while, and then beds, which are shady all summer, are planted with white impatiens. Crawford plants blue daisies along the walks. During summer, most of the old tulip bulbs simply rot away. In the fall, the beds again lie fallow for a few weeks. And then they are replanted with tulips once more.
