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Beheading the tulips at Roozengaarde, Mount Vernon WA.


You may have planted tulips one year and got great blooms, but then following years fewer and smaller blooms. This beheading is part of the reason: the natural cycle of the tulip is to grow a large bulb, flower, and then that year the bulb divides into two smaller bulbs, neither of which flower for a couple of years. Flowering and forming seed takes a lot of stored energy out of the bulb, but beheading (aka "topping") aborts that process and the stored energy stays in bulb; even if it does divide, one of the daughter bulbs is usually big enough to flower.


You'll notice that not every flower has been removed. The ones left are the ones that did not come true to the variety being grown in that field. This could be because of accidental mix-ups among bulb varieties, or because of mutations. One person, usually someone with a fair knowledge of tulip growing, goes through the fields and pulls these out by the roots to discard. On very rare occasions a viable 'sport' or new variety is discovered this way.


The workers in these fields are mostly Mexican. They mostly wear bandannas over their faces, partly to keep pollen and dust out of their nose and mouth, but also because of the hordes of tourists snapping away. While I was there that day I saw the border patrol aka la migra roll through the fields twice. Constant surveillance.

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