Sowing the Seeds of Tradition

The tradition of planting tulips on the Texas Tech campus began in 1982. This year, crews planted more than 119,000 on the TTU and Texas Tech Health Sciences Center campuses. Download Texas Tech Wallpaper.

A dynamic mix of reds, yellows, whites, purples and greens might not be what you see on the runways in Paris, but that’s what Texas Tech is wearing this spring.

When you think of tulips, you might imagine colorful flower-covered fields in Holland – not in West Texas. With its arid climate, harsh winds, drastic temperature changes and alkaline soil, Texas Tech University has put botanists to the test, creating an oasis on campus.

It takes about 40 crew members, 119,000 tulip bulbs and about two weeks to give the campus its spring makeover. As the months pass and days get longer and warmer, the campus community is treated to a wash of red and yellow to welcome in the new season.

“The first tulips were planted in 1982,” said Gene Gibson, managing director of Grounds Maintenance. “We wanted to plant flowers with vibrant colors, since the grass wouldn’t green up until later.”

Out of the many varieties and colors of tulips to choose from, grounds crews settled on only two, the Golden and Red Apledoorn varieties. The flowers, which grow 14 to 18 inches tall, are a surprisingly nice fit to a West Texas climate with cool winters and warm, dry summers. With a large flower head and strong stem, these towering tulips are some of the most weather resistant of all garden tulips and are known for standing up to storms and high winds, which can be treacherous in this part of the country.

“The winds can be pretty hard on the plants, but the flowers are pretty resilient” said Gibson. “Sometimes we get a late snow and it is beautiful seeing red and yellow blooms in contrast to the white snow.”

From Brown Bulbs to Brilliant Color

Although the flowers don’t bloom until spring, sowing begins in the fall around November. Grounds crew members can be seen crowding around flower beds and hovering over buckets of bulbs, ready to create a masterpiece. Usually working in teams of two, one person uses a large auger to drill holes in the beds while another follows behind with a bucket of bulbs, tossing them in one-by-one with precision and grace. The bed is then raked to make sure each bulb is completely covered and protected during the winter months.

Speed is the key for team members who move from bed to bed like a well-oiled machine. This year, crews planted 28,000 red tulips and 30,000 golden tulips on the main campus and 26,000 red and 35,000 golden at the Health Sciences Center. At the same time they also plant white and purple kale and multicolored pansies, which are hardier plants and last through the winter months.

Bloom and Grow

Once finished, the waiting begins – approximately four months. The crew’s hard work is finally visible sometime between late March and early April, when the colorful blooms begin to emerge and the Texas Tech campus becomes a velvety sea of dynamic red and yellow surrounded by accents of purple and green.

The blooms only last about three weeks, but during those few weeks, the campus comes alive with color and Red Raiders say they are filled with pride for their beautiful campus.