How to grow tulips and best varieties

Tulips are one of the most glamorous plants in the spring garden. 

They grow well in both pots and borders, and the bulbs should be planted in late autumn.

Which? Gardening magazine grew a range of popular varieties to see which would give us the best display.

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Key facts

Plant type Spring-flowering bulbs

Position Full sun or partial shade

Soil Well-drained soil

How to grow tulips: month by month

Best tulip varieties

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Full testing results for tulips

Tulips for pots

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Double tulips - annual or perennial?

It’s tempting to leave tulips in the ground or their pots in the hope that they will grow and flower again the following year. And while this can be true of some tulips, we found it wasn’t the case with most of these showy double varieties. The display was less impressive for all those we grew in the set of bulbs left in the ground to reflower. Only a handful of varieties – ‘Aveyron’, ‘Blue Diamond’, ‘Crème Upstar’, ‘Hermitage Double’, ‘Margarita’ and ‘Sun Lover’ – came back with a decent number of blooms, so it’s probably best to think of double tulips as annuals and plant fresh bulbs each autumn.

Our verdict: Double tulips are best treated as annuals; buy fresh bulbs each autumn.

Planting

Plant tulip bulbs in a sunny sheltered spot, at three times their own depth, spacing them 10-20cm apart. 

Wait until November to plant them to avoid the fungal disease tulip fire. 

If growing in pots, add a controlled-release fertiliser to the compost and plant bulbs in layers to boost the display.

Identify your plants with Best Buy plastic-free labels

Caring for your plants

How to get tulips to reflower

Tulips are a spring favourite, but have a reputation for being unreliable when it comes to getting them to flower more than once. Some seem to return each year, but others simply disappear, leaving you with gaps in your display. It can happen even if you plant them in pots, with flowering becoming  weaker each year or stopping completely. It’s expensive to buy fresh bulbs every year, so we wanted to know if there are any planting strategies we could adopt to get them to reflower reliably.

For most tulips, planting the bulbs deeply (around 15cm deep) and leaving them in the ground gives the best results. 

But if you can’t avoid lifting them, then don’t bother planting them too deeply– they will be just as happy shallow planted and then replanted the following autumn. 

Parrot tulips don’t like being left in the ground at all, and shallow planting and lifting this type of tulip seems to produce the best blooms in subsequent years. 

For pots, we would recommend lifting them and replanting for the following year, or buy fresh bulbs each autumn. 

We didn’t feed our tulips as few amateur gardeners do, but applying a liquid foliar feed at the end of flowering and removing all the dead heads may encourage flowering for the second year.

Discover our Best Buy liquid feeds

Common growing problems

Tulip fire

The signs to look for are stunted or twisted leaves as the foliage emerges. If the leaves do open, they are often ragged, with brown spots and the 'scorched' appearance which gives the virus its name. Flowers bear similar symptoms. There's sometimes a fuzzy grey mould, especially in damp weather. Tiny black seed-like structures called sclerotia form in the dead foliage and can contaminate the soil for several years. 

If you notice signs of blight on emerging tulips, as soon as possible remove them carefully, preferably in dry weather when the fungus isn't producing spores, and burn them. Whatever you do, don't add them to your compost heap.

Tulip fire lives in the soil so unfortunately you can't replant with tulips for at least three years. You can still plant tulips in containers, or in containers that you sink into the ground and remove after flowering. There are no chemical controls.

Slugs and snails

Slugs and snails can nibble the young leaves. Pick off any you find and use ferric-phosphate slug pellets. Squirrels often dig up bulbs, so you may need to cover them with chicken wire until the first shoots emerge.

Read more about slugs and snails

How we test tulips

We planted the bulbs in our trial grounds in November. As they came into flower in the spring, we kept records of how long they were in flower, noting whether all the plants of the same variety flowered at a similar time and height. We kept an eye out for any problems caused by pests, diseases or the weather. For the tulips for pots, we also assessed the plants’ suitability for pots, looking especially at the length and thickness of their stems.