CHEYENNE — There’s just something tulips love about high-altitude sunshine, which helps them look vibrant, like little gems under a glittering sun.
There’s a reason they look so good at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, and it isn’t just because of all the expert horticulturists there. Turns out the mountainous high plains are the tulip’s idea of nirvana.
Isaiah Smith is the horticulture and operations supervisor for Cheyenne Botanic Gardens. In that role, he oversees a plant population that far exceeds that of Cheyenne itself and includes thousands upon thousands of tulips.
Holland may be famous for its tulips, but they “are native to the northern Middle East, Mongolia and northern China,” Smith told Cowboy State Daily. “They have high elevation, dry conditions, grasslands — and that’s us, pretty much. So, tulips end up being very, very good for us.”
Smith grows beds of tulips in multiple locations at the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens. They like the conditions so well, some of them have made Cheyenne their home for as much as a decade.
In many states, tulip bulbs need replacement every three or so years.
The extraordinary longevity of many tulip species in Cheyenne is helping the botanic gardens expand the size of its tulip displays a little more each year.
“There’s about 6,000 tulips right here in these four beds,” Smith said, gesturing to a display just behind the Shane Smith Grand Conservatory.
“Those have been here at least five or six years,” Smith said.
Pointing to some newer tulips planted after dividing existing tulips, he added, “Those are some of our first satellite plants.”
That tulips are spreading and dividing is a good sign, one that shows the spring beauties have everything they want in Cheyenne.
In addition to dividing tulips every so often, Smith will also order 10,000 new tulip bulbs each year.
Some of those replace bulbs that have finally petered out, but for the most part, the new bulbs either add to the size of existing displays or help him test new varieties.
“Tulips tend to do very well for us,” Smith said. “It’s because they like to be dry during the summer. And we’ll do a new tulip show every spring. That’s part of one of our sponsorships.”
This year, Smith is testing out the idea of having some allium bulbs, which are members of the onion family, amongst the tulips.
Allium is part of the onion family. They will come out a little bit later than the tulip display with a big fuzzy ball of color, brightening things up until it’s time to plant the space with annuals.
Growing A Plant City
Tulips are just the start of the booming plant population at Cheyenne Botanic Gardens. Smith and his crew oversee 10 acres of plants outside, as well as 4,500 plants in the conservatory.
On top of that, they will grow waves of plants that total 45,000 annuals each year. The greenhouse, which is a wing off to the side of the Shane Smith Grand Conservatory, is where most of that population is born.
The annuals populate not only the displays at Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, but also various traffic islands and city gardens in Cheyenne parks.
“Most everything starts as seed first,” Smith said. “That just ends up being more reliable and economical.”
The seeds are planted out in flats that hold 200 plants each, in a tiny little cone of soil that’s not much bigger than a pinky finger.
Once these babies have true leaves, the tiny plant citizens will be tough enough, despite how fragile they look, to transplant to flats with more growing space. Larger and larger size growing room is provided all along the way, until they become big enough to go outside, where they will become beautiful new members of the Cheyenne community.
“For the city, we do a lot of bulk. So big colors,” Smith said. “You know, you’re driving by at 30 miles plus, so you can’t really have detail.”
One of the stars for those types of beds are plants in the coleus group of plants, which offers a variety of colorful plants with big, showy leaves that often have showy patterns.
“There’s not so much a flower as there’s just a big leaf that has color,” Smith said.
That means there’s no need to pluck blossoms – called deadheading — to keep a colorful display going. It’s no fuss, no muss with coleus.
“We don’t have a whole lot of time for deadheading,” Smith said. “And there’s plenty of plants that do just fine by themselves without being extra like that.”
Like calibrachoa, a showy relative of the petunia. The flowers are smaller, but the vines are bigger, so it makes an excellent specimen for hanging baskets. The plant deadheads itself, dropping spent blooms, and keeps on going and going with new blooms until first frost.
Another cool plant for big color block displays is dusty miller. It offers silvery white leaves that can be a bold contrast in a foliage bed. It will also keep a nice compact shape when grown in full sun.
“There’s no significant flower, but it’s a nice, good-looking leaf that shows up from a distance,” Smith said. “Like when you’re driving 30 miles an hour, you can still see it.”
Zinnias Are Last, But Not Because of ‘Z’
Zinnias are among the last annuals that get planted for the botanic garden’s summer wave, and that’s just because they grow the fastest.
By starting the slowest growing plants first and the fastest growing plants last, everything reaches the right planting size at the same time.
“We try to shoot for the beginning of June to have plants ready to plant,” Smith said. “So far, May has been pretty decent for us. We’ve only had one or two nearly freezing nights.”
Smith fully expects at least one more freezing cold snap, though, before June. That’s part of the reason the botanic garden waits to put tender annuals outside.
“I guarantee next week or so, we’ll be getting snow out of the blue,” he said. “So we try to educate folks about that because they’re already asking where are the plants? Particularly on days like today, where it’s 80-something degrees.”
There are also herbs growing in the greenhouse for the herb garden, and there are showy, fussy, and weird plants as well, like purple sweet potato vines.
The vines will put on quite a show in a garden, but they are tricky to manage in Wyoming.
“Our nighttimes are about 20 to 30 degrees different than the day,” Smith said. “So for something that grows in a pot, it drops outside of the range they like.”
That stuns the semi-tropical plant, which doesn’t like anything below 68 Fahrenheit.
“They will actually stop growing,” Smith said. “And that’s what (turns) them (into) a long season plant here.”
Another of the weird plants Smith is trying out is called cardoon. It’s a relative of artichoke, but instead of eating the flower, it’s the stems that are harvested.
They, too, will slow down a lot if they get too cold, too early.
“They kind of like start going dormant,” Smith said. “And then you have to warm them up again.”
The Native Plant Trend
Once the greenhouse is empty of its first summer wave of annuals, there’s maybe a two-week lull, and then a new wave of plants starts to come along. Things like marigold and celosia and gladiolus for the Día de los Muertos celebration, which generally starts in October and runs through the first of November.
“We used to grow poinsettias here, but they are a little bit trickier and temperamental, and we have a lot of stuff in here that kind of just wants very specific conditions,” Smith said. “Growing poinsettias means we’d have to exclude stuff, so it’s just easier to contract with a different greenhouse to bring that in.”
The fall wave includes thousands more plants that help extend the colorful display in the botanic garden and city gardens, keeping things pretty and colorful as long as possible.
But annuals aren’t the only things growing in the greenhouse. There are lots of experiments underway, too, like carnivorous plants and cacti, as well as the new trend toward native plants, which can make sense anywhere a landscaper is looking for tougher plants that don’t need as much care once established.
“Thinking of like the Depot Plaza, where most people are during the summer, having native plants there doesn’t quite work,” he said. “It’s too small of a pot for these native plants. Most of our native plants are very deeply rooted. They have taproots or underground storage organs where a container doesn’t quite work.”
But those deep roots make them a smart choice for areas where it might be difficult to haul water on a regular basis, or areas where there’s likely to be at least some level of neglect. Native plants have fended for themselves for millions of years. They’re used to the geology and the climate, and don’t tend to be overly fussy about things like fertilizer and pesticides to keep growing.
“The show is different,” Smith said. “(Non-native) plants are obviously bred to be non-stop color, but they may not be very tough plants. Natives are tough plants but may only bloom for two weeks.”
That requires a kind of staggered design, Smith said, where there’s always something blooming during the summer, every two weeks or so.
What About Winter
Another thing native plants can offer the landscape is interesting structure during the off-season, whether that’s prairie dropseed, which gets a golden spray of popcorn-smelling seeds in the fall that birds and mammals adore, or a bush that offers bright red berries in winter.
Those are also attractive to birds and small mammals and can be part of helping support wildlife during tough times like winter, while also bringing a fun show to a living room window.
The structure of plants is something Smith considers when he’s plotting out a landscape.
“Forget the summer, forget beautiful conditions,” he said. “Everything grows during the summer. It’s the fall, the winter, the spring, but especially the winter for us. It’s not beautiful outside sometimes, and if you only plant summer annuals in your bed, nine months out of the year you’re looking at a flat piece of ground.”
Perennials and native plants can help create design interest for all seasons.
“Maybe it’s the way the plant dries during winter, or maybe it has a really cool form,” he said. “Moving some of those traffic triangles and things like that to a more natural look, I think is something that’s going to pay off. And hopefully it’s a little less work, a little less resources.”
Contact Renee Jean at renee@cowboystatedaily.com
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
