Tulips & Florida: my story

Tulips in Victoria, B.C. in front of the Empress Hotel

I have always loved tulips!

Tulips (Tulipa spp), spring-blooming perennials that grow from bulbs, are in the lily family, Liliaceae. There are about 75 species, but thousands of cultivars. 

Their showy flowers have what looks like 6 petals, but the inside 3 are true petals and the outside 3 are sepals, but since they look the same, they are called tepals. Quite often they have a different colored blotch at the base of the tepals. The standard tulip colors are solid, but a virus causes splotching and variegation and these “broken tulips” are highly valued.

Tulips are native to much of the Near East and Central Asia, the Persian and Turkish people were the first to cultivate tulips. They were introduced to Europe in the 16th Century as the Ottoman Empire spread and then became associated with the Netherlands, which became the major producer for world markets.

In Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

The tulip gardens were spectacular in in Victoria, B. C. in April 2026 when I was there. This was the last port at the end of an 18-day Vancouver to Hawaii & back cruise where I was a Guest Lecturer & Naturalist. Sue, my college roommate at UMass a just few decades ago, was my companion. She wanted to go to Butchart Gardens.

Our ship arrived at around 11am, so we caught a ride to the Empress Hotel about a mile & a half from the port to catch the 12:30pm Butchart Gardens Express Shuttle, which includes the 30-minute drive narrated by the driver to & from the garden & the entrance fee for the gardens. There were about 15 of our fellow cruise ship passengers on the last bus back at 4:30pm, so the very nice driver took us back to the dock after dropping off the other passengers at the Empress Hotel. 

What was interesting about the tulip beds both in Victoria and Butchart Gardens is that beds were fully planted with forget-me-nots, daffodils, English daisies and various other ground-hugging plants. While the tulips were at their peak blooming when we were there, once they begin to fade, they are not particularly attractive, so these low-growing plants will keep the beds looking good well into the summer. These beds are planted from scratch each season and all the thousands of tulip bulbs are new from the Netherlands each year. The old bulbs and almost all other plant waste is carefully composted and sterilized, so the gardens never have to buy soil. 

Tulips in Florida

When I lived in Maryland, I always had tulips in the front bed. I didn't buy new bulbs every year, but every third year or so I'd buy new bulbs to add to the garden. As I recall, I didn't dig out the old bulbs, but simply added new ones to the mix. They were beautiful every spring.  

When we moved to North Florida where we experience killing frosts in the winter. (In 2004, when we moved here, there were about 12 frosts each winter, but now it's about half that.) It did not occur to me that because the temperatures between the cold spells could reach 70˚F or higher that the soil would not be cold enough long enough for the bulbs to complete their cycle. So, in the fall of 2004, I bought 64 tulip bulbs at a local store. The next spring, only 2 leaves had sprouted!  I talked to a neighbor, who said that everyone knows you need to put them in the refrigerator for 6 weeks and then plant them at the end of January. I tried that the next year and did get some flowers, but obviously not the results I was looking for.

When I thought about it, I got angry. I had purchased the bulbs at a local store, so the stores are setting up gardeners for guaranteed failure. There was nothing on the packaging of the bulbs that mentioned that the bulbs needed sustained cold for at least 6 weeks to bloom and nothing about refrigeration. Here I was a life-long gardener with an advanced degree in botany and I had failed Florida Gardening 101. What were other gardeners doing? 

How I became a writer...

The Jacksonville Times Union newspaper started a community columnist program just after my tulip failure. I decided to participate to share my adventures in Florida gardening. I called my columns "Adventures of a Transplanted Gardener" and wrote about something every other week or so. There was a meeting at the Times' office for the columnists where the organizers shared what they were looking for and we all received tee shirts. After a few months I also started to record podcasts at their offices where I'd written out the story line and held a conversation with the host. I'd record 4 podcasts per trip and they'd post them each week. I did about 100 podcasts and an equal number of columns, sometimes the topics complemented each other, but more often, the topics were different. Eventually they stopped the program and a few years later, the podcasts were no longer available.

Sometime after I'd written a bunch of columns, I was a speaker at a writers' conference in Jacksonville where I was talking to writers about their websites. I'd been designing websites as a side gig when I was a professional staff person at a Maryland community college in the Computer & Business Department. So I was encouraging them to use their writing skills to find a good headline to grab people's attention. After I gave my talk, I attended a session given by John Byram, an editor at University Press of Florida. After his talk, I talked to him about my Adventures of a Transplanted Gardener columns, and maybe the Press might wish to do a collection of them, since I was sure I was not the only person flummoxed by Florida gardening. "Well," he said, "unless you're Carl Hiaasen, we don't print anything that's been previously published. But, could you write an organic gardening book for Florida?" I innocently said, "Sure, I could do that." He gave me his card and in the next 2 months or so, I put together a 20-page proposal making the case for a sustainable gardening book, because it was more important and would reach a wider audience than "organic gardening." Surprisingly, the board of directors at the Press approved my book.

The process...

My husband told me that he did not want my writing profits to push us in a higher tax bracket, so my contract with the Press for that book was that they pay The Florida branch of The Nature Conservancy 50% of the royalties so I never see that money. (I've continued this process with most of my other books since then, but the split royalties are paid to the Florida Native Plant Society.) But no worries, writing gardening books is not particularly profitable. Read this summary for what goes into writing a gardening book and how royalties work.

I needed to find and pay an illustrator. I worked out a deal with an architect professor I knew back in Maryland. Then I had to write the book and take photos that would be in the center of the book on special slick paper. The first draft took more than a year to put together. The Press hired 3 peer reviewers who fact-checked the text and made suggestions for improvement. Their reviews were harsh. They said I did it in the wrong order. I should have started with the easy topics first and that we don't have ground hogs in Florida and much, much more. So back to work. Since the order was changed, it was like 52-card pick-up. Everything had to be totally rewritten. This took 6 or 7 months and then 2 of the 3 peer reviewers went through it again. The rewrites were easier the second time and then it finally was published in 2009. Sustainable Gardening For Florida continues to sell well, even after all these years since its 14 chapters cover a wide range of topics related to being more successful in our gardening.

"Adventures of a Transplanted 
Gardener" May, 2022

I then put together a book tour of Florida where I spoke at events around Florida. During that tour, I met Melissa Markham Contreras who was coordinating events at Fairchild Botanical Garden in Miami. She was a Master Gardener, ran a charity that installed vegetable gardens in people’s yards, and also organized farmers markets. Her background was totally opposite mine and with her connections and experience in growing veggies in South Florida, I recruited her to help me write “Organic Methods for Vegetable Gardening in Florida.” I had also met Marjorie Shropshire along the way at Florida Native Plant Society events and she was our illustrator. This was the book that John Byram was originally looking for when we first met. In 2021, during the pandemic, Melissa & I put together a second edition with updated information, new crops, and more photos that are now throughout the book and not just in the center.

Also, during the pandemic, I finally wrote "Adventures of a Transplanted Gardener," but instead of just a collection of my old columns, I looked at them with 20/20 hindsight to help people new to Florida gardening to be successful and bypass some of the mistakes I made. After it was published, I called John, who is now in New Mexico, and told him that I'd finally written the book that I'd proposed all those years ago. He was surprised to hear from me. I also sent him a copy.

So yes, my love for tulips was the spark that began my unplanned writing career. Writing gardening books has been its own interesting and very educational adventure. And Marjorie has been a great partner all these years, either as the illustrator or coauthor, for all of my books except the Transplanted Gardener book where I just used my photos. 

And, my parting advice is to NOT to plant tulips in Florida, but to plant something native to your region to better support the birds and pollinators! And here in Florida, we DO have a wide range beautiful natives to work with. Our native flowers are the reason that Juan Ponce de Leon named this region "La Florida, Land of the Flowers" more than 500 years ago. 

Green Gardening Matters,
Ginny Stibolt
www.GreenGardeningMatters.com