For hundreds of years and in many different cultures around the world, tulips have been known to symbolize deep, unconditional love.
Their captivating beauty makes them an ideal flower to give to a loved one, parents, or even siblings.
As such, you will find no shortage of home gardeners opting to grow them to add color to their gardens.
What color are tulips? Tulips are spring-blooming perennials that produce colored flowers in different hues. In fact, they come in almost every color of the rainbow, from white cream and pale pink to bright yellow and red. There are also purple, maroon, and black tulips.
How Many Different Colors of Tulips Are There?
With 6,000 named tulip cultivars, it can be a challenge to determine just how many different colors tulips come in.
What’s more, breeders continue to develop new hybrids to this day in hopes of achieving even more color variations.
You can find tulips in hundreds of color patterns and petal forms, but 10 color varieties distinguish them from each other.
These standard colors include white, cream, yellow, orange, salmon, pink, red, purple, violet, and green.
Other common tulip colors are apricot, maroon, vermillion, bronze, brown, and black.
You might have noticed a lack of blue from this list.
Compared to other colors, you’d be hard-pressed to find blue in nature, which is why you’ll rarely see a blue flower.
Even so, tulip breeders are working hard to achieve such and are close to developing a hybrid “true blue” tulip.
Popular Colors of Tulips
The beauty of tulips does not stop at just their colors. Instead, each one represents something that makes them unique from the other.
If you’re curious to know more about these well-loved spring flowers, here’s what the most popular tulip color means:
White and Cream Tulips
White and cream tulips symbolize holiness, innocence, and purity.
Because of this, people often use them as gifts for someone celebrating a baptism, communion, or other religious milestones.
Weddings also use white and cream tulips all the time, as they are known to represent respect and honor.
This reason is also why they are popularly used to send your condolences to someone who has lost a family member.
Some cultures believe that white tulips signify new beginnings, especially if you see them in a dream.
Yellow Tulips
As you can imagine, the warm, sunny color of yellow tulips will easily brighten up a dull garden.
They will also look fantastic in a single-color garden together with Sweet Harmony, Golden Melody, and Cistula.
Back in the day, yellow blooms were believed to represent jealousy and unrequited love, but that was then.
Today, yellow tulips are now used to inspire more positive meanings, such as hope, cheerfulness, and happiness.
Some even believe that planting them in your front yard will bring prosperity and good luck to your entire household.
Orange Tulips
Like yellow buds, the bright color of orange tulips is frequently seen as a good symbol of happiness and excitement.
Its warm, sunshine-like beauty can also mean passion, desire, enthusiasm, and energy.
Orange tulips make the perfect bouquet you give someone you feel spiritually and physically connected with to show your appreciation and understanding.
Pink Tulips
Because they inspire feelings of affection, pink tulips are the ideal flowers to give someone if you want to show them you care.
You can also use them to send well wishes and good luck to a close friend who’s entering a new chapter in their life.
Often, a bouquet of pink tulips is given to a person celebrating a graduation, the birth of a baby, or a job promotion.
Red Tulips
As you probably can tell already, red tulips represent love and romance. In fact, many see them as the most romantic color of all tulips.
Similar to red roses, you give red tulips to show your deep affection and everlasting love for a special someone.
Red is also a color of passion and desire, making red tulips the perfect gift for young couples in a new relationship.
Green Tulips
Green tulips feature softly colored ivory-white petals with green feathering that bloom later than their counterparts.
While they may be late bloomers, their unusual beauty makes them a worthy addition to any home garden.
Also called Viridiflora tulips, they belong to the group of bi-color tulips that represent elegance.
Purple Tulips
Did you know that purple is the royal color? In fact, many years ago, only the wealthiest could afford to buy purple fabrics.
Purple dye was hard to come by back then, so they were outrageously more expensive than other colors.
Fast-forward to now, purple is still used to mean elegance and royalty.
In other cultures, purple represents rebirth. As such, you will often see purple tulips in bouquets you give someone to wish them a great new start.
Black Tulips
Black tulips are not really black per se, but more like the color of eggplant.
Nevertheless, their elegant and mysterious color makes them the perfect blooms to symbolize strength and power.
For gardeners, black tulips are among those rare hybrid tulips that require extra effort to grow.
If you’d like to try your hand at growing them, you’ll have more than a few to choose from, such as Black Parrot tulip, Nearly Black, Queen of the Night Black, and Ebony Queen Black tulip.
Conclusion
Because of the many colors, they come in, it’s no surprise that tulips are some of the most popular flowers across many countries.
From bright yellow and orange to pinks and reds, you won’t run out of tulip colors to match your personality and style.
The key is knowing what each of the colors represents. That way, you can use them for their intended purpose.
Regardless if you’re growing one or more types of tulips, make sure you plant them in well-draining soil in a spot that receives full sun or light shade.
And as perennials, you can expect them to come back and produce more followers from one growing season to the next.
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