The Trouble With Tulips: Field-Grown Blooms Don't Last Forever

Every time you take the family to tiptoe through tulips, you may be saving a local farm. Tulip festivals and other bloom-centric events boost flower growers' bottom line so much that it takes the sting out of inexpensive floral imports that fill buckets at grocery stores year round.

The good news about tulips? They grow easily in Washington and Oregon. Bulbs reap the benefits of dry summers and cool springs, and deliver a rainbow of showy flowers propped up by robust stems with blade-like, bluish-green leaves.

Tulips — one of the most popular flowers in the world — wither in equatorial South America, which sends 75 percent of its billion-dollar cut flowers business to the U.S. And although growers in the Netherlands — tulip central — may fly greenhouse stems to New York and other East Coast cities, it doesn't make sense to send perishable bundles another 2,500 miles here.

Besides, Pacific Northwest tulips have a large, loyal following.

To read the rest of the story, please go to: The Oregonian