When I moved into my house, I bought two bags of tulip bulbs from Jackson and Perkins, an Oregon-based flower and plant company.  My yard is composed of clay soil that requires a pneumatic drill to penetrate, so I bought a bunch of pots and boxes and things like that and planted the bulbs.   I was ridiculously pleased that they came up and bloomed.  The strange part about this was that although the bulbs were mixed together randomly in the bags, I somehow managed to plant them so that they are grouped by color.  Stranger still, there are two different shades of yellow and two shades of pink, and the similar shades were planted together, although they weren’t marked in any way.

This year the tulips are coming up again, despite my having forgotten to feed the poor things or do anything to refresh the soil they’ve been sitting in.  As a result, the leaves look a little moth-eaten, but then, I don’t look so good these days either, so I’m not in a position to criticize.  Having seen the tulips come up and bloom last year, the initial thrill of that was gone, but I was delighted to see that most of the bulbs have split, so now I have twice as many flowers.  They’re smaller, but there are more of them.  I had been told that bulbs do this, so I don’t know why I was surprised when they did what they were supposed to do.  I wonder if I should transplant them into a bigger container before next spring.  Probably I’ll forget, and I’ll once agan forget to feed them, and sooner or later they’ll give up and die from neglect. 

Isn’t my optimism inspiring?