Yardsmart: Tulips after food
I'm not excited by uniformity. What I want is a tulip that is unique unto itself. The only way I can find true satisfaction in this regard is with the broken ones.
In that dead zone in your yard, after the vegetables have withered with frost, this is the place to bring broken tulips into your garden and your life.
Such tulips are not popular among those who wish to be safe and predictable. They began as diseased forms of flowers that interfered with the distribution of color in the petal. The virus damaged the production of hormones that control color, resulting in erratic distribution of it within the bloom.
This was over 300 years ago, and since then the broken ones were stabilized in the genes because the virus could, over time, degrade vigor. A first-generation afflicted would yield a weaker second generation and so on until only spindly plants and small irregular flowers resulted. Stable broken tulips became grouped under a tragic name of Rembrandt, the artist who did not paint flowers but people. This name hardly describes the singular potential of what lies inside every tulip with broken color.
