Blog- a flower blooming and withering

A Flower Blooming and Withering

In elementary or middle school, we learned a phrase from Tagore :
"Let life be beautiful like summer flowers and death like autumn leaves."

Which specific "summer flowers" did Tagore refer to, I do not know. Why "summer flowers" not "spring flowers", I do not know either. Keeping asking questions like this feels like splitting hair and does not make too much sense. But as spring comes and flowers started to bloom, every different one of them does make me feel a little bit different. I guess Tagore probably felt the same way. When he said "summer flowers", there might be a vague image of "typical summer flowers" popped up into his head.

Despite being in the season of blooming, this beautiful stage only occupies small portion of most flowers' life cycle. I had the thought of recording life cycle of a flower by the end of last year. I started with 10 white tulip bulbs and put the them into 3 pots in a 3-3-4 manner. I took one image of every pot every single day, and stacked the image together using photoshop to get a simple time-elapsed video. I had a few failed attempts growing tulips in the past. As an experimentalist, this time I separated the bulbs into three different groups and put them in fridge for different length of time. As you will see very soon, although there are blubs finishing the whole cycle, many of them only made it half way and just stopped there. Some of them didn't even come out of the soil.

This pot has three bulbs with shortest duration in the fridge (5 weeks). All three came out of the soil and grew pretty well at the beginning, but only one of them fully bloomed. If you look carefully, you can see another one already developed a bud on the stem. It was almost there but stopped for some reason -- the bud never came out of the leaves, and the plant directly went to the stage of withering.
I consider this being the best pot among all three, the tulips grew in a steady and strong manner. The flower was pretty beautiful too, but soon the stem bent on its own for reason I still not know at this moment.

Out of soil: 3/3 Budding: 2/3 Blooming: 1/3

All three bulbs in the second pots stayed in the fridge for 6 weeks. They grew well at the beginning too, but the leaves started to turn yellow soon without even a sign of budding. Searching "why tulip leaves turn yellow before flowering" gives me an universal answer that can never be wrong but essentially useless : "it can be watering issue, lighting issue, nutrient issue, or fungal/pest."This does feel like doing wet lab experiment: when something failed, it can be temperature, concentration, pressure, potential contamination, or one of another hundreds parameters that you didn't pay attention to at the beginning. It always takes time, careful observation, plenty of experience, and sometimes a little bit of luck to get things to work out.

Out of soil: 3/3 Budding: 0/3 Blooming: 0/3

All four remaining bulbs stayed in the fridge for 7 weeks. Only 2 of them came out of the soil, although all 4 sprouted after getting planted into the pot (I literally dig the pot and check how the bulbs looked like). Despite being the last batch to be put into the pot, one of them grew extremely fast and soon became the tallest plant among the all tulips I had. It did manage to bloom, but the stem suffered from the same bending issue as the one in the first pot. The other bulb out of the soil, as you can see, made no effort to grow any taller before giving up.

Out of soil: 2/4 Budding: 1/4 Blooming: 1/4

This short experiment is obviously too limited for me to give any tips on "how to grow tulip successfully", and it was not my intention to write the blog in the first place. I was trying to see the life cycle of a flower. The time of blooming occupies such a small portion of the tulip life (especially Yifeng's tulip), and many didn't even reach the stage of budding. I went to see cherry blossoms, roses, and tulips here and there this spring, I felt that every one of them was gently tapping my heart, but with a specific rhythm. However, the fact that eventually they are all going to wither and turn into part of the soil always came into my mind. Literally everything is changing: life comes and goes, relationships build up and break up, hairs grow and cut, coupons valid and expire. Therefore, here comes the 100th time that I bring out Maugham's quote from the novel The Razor's Edge :

"Endless duration makes good no better, nor white any whiter. If the rose at noon has lost the beauty it had at dawn, the beauty it had then was real. Nothing in the world is permanent, and we are foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy. We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing too."

I will cheer with the flowers I have seen and those I'm going to see in the future.

Last edited: May 2025