“They light up my life!” June Hood says, describing her love for tulips. “500 tulips are not enough—next year I’m planting MORE.”
At her home in the North Carolina mountains, June indulges her passion for growing and arranging tulips. Due to the weather and fauna of her local environment, raising tulips isn’t as easy as setting the bulbs and waiting for flowers. She plants the bulbs in raised beds covered on top and sides with chicken wire to keep out deer and rabbits.
Photo by Mary Walton Upchurch
June Hood loves to share her tulips with friends.
Photo by Mary Walton Upchurch
June gathers cut tulips in a handmade mountain gathering basket.
Every spring after the tulips have bloomed, she pulls them up and then plants new bulbs in the fall. Some tulips, including parrot tulips, don’t come back the next year and are more easily treated as annuals. A few varieties of species tulips, Giant Darwin, and Greigii tulips, will come back the following year, but their bloom will be not be as good as the first year and gradually they disappear.
Photo by Mary Walton Upchurch
June is an artist who paints with oils. With her artist’s eye, she makes arrangements that express her joy for tulips. In these vignettes, she often includes pieces of her cherished majolica collection. “All those years of collecting majolica, I never enjoyed the pieces because I was always working. But now I’ve retired, I have time to enjoy the collection.”
Photo by Mary Walton Upchurch
June painted this copy of ‘The Oyster Gatherers at Cancale’ by John Singer Sargent.
Photo by Mary Walton Upchurch
Boterkoek served with tea and tulips. June painted this copy of ‘The Postman Roulin’ by Vincent Van Gogh.
June attributes her passion for tulips in part to her Dutch heritage; her mother from Rotterdam met June’s father during World War II. When they married, her parents moved to Miami where June grew up. Unable to grow tulips in Miami, June knew the flowers only from tulips painted on Delft pottery. However, June always managed to find tulips for her mother’s birthday.
Photo by Mary Walton Upchurch
June prefers tulip arrangements of colors in the same palette. Here 'Princess Irene,' 'Menton Singe Late Tulip,' 'Rasta Parrot' and 'Apricot Parrot' amplify colors in the copper pot.
Photo by Mary Walton Upchurch
'Amazing' tulips share a glass vase with Pieris japonica. June likes to see the occasional bulb still on the tulips.
Now living in North Carolina, June rejoices in her ability to grow these special flowers. When she invites friends to her home to enjoy her tulip arrangements, June serves her mother’s prize boterkoek, a traditional Dutch shortbread. She feels boterkoek and tulips naturally go together.
“I love all the tulip varieties,” she explains, “but my favorites are the parrot tulips because they are wild and untamed—no two look alike.”
Photo by Mary Walton Upchurch
'Apricot Parrot' tulip
Photo by Mary Walton Upchurch
'Amazing' tulip
Photo by Mary Walton Upchurch
'Rasta Parrot' tulip
June’s Tulip Arranging Tips
The strange thing about tulips is that they will grow taller once they have been cut and placed in cool water. Sometimes they can grow as much as 5-6 inches, so your arrangement may appear different two days after it’s made. If you are placing them in a vase with other flowers, you may want to cut them a second time to adjust their height.
I prefer to keep tulips exclusive in an arrangement so that your eye can appreciate the infinite details of each bloom. Their individual beauty and uniqueness are so magical that any arrangement, no matter how simple, can be a show stopper.
Tulips bend over and reach towards the light while in the vase, and when you turn them back towards you so that you can see into the blossom, I like to say they are singing. That moment is like true love.
How on earth can I settle for any other flower after having harvested the tulip?
Text and photography Mary Walton Upchurch © 2024
Garden writer Mary Walton Upchurch grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, and earned a degree in landscape architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. For more than 30 years, she practiced in Montgomery as an award-winning landscape architect and wrote garden articles for a local publication. Now retired, she lives in western North Carolina where she built a home and garden on top of a mountain with panoramic views of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
