Stop and Smell the Tulips: New Blooms in Midtown

A brisk stroll down Midtown Atlanta’s Peachtree Street this spring reveals a pleasant surprise as the temperatures slowly rise.

Green buds are beginning to dot the branches of trees, bees and butterflies are returning to their normal grazing grounds and splashes of color are painting the intermittent flowerbeds. Tulips seem to be the star of the show this spring. It feels as if the cheery flowers just popped up overnight of their own volition. However, that is far from reality. Midtown Alliance, the neighborhood’s nonprofit organization, works diligently behind the scenes to beautify the area year-round.

Midtown Alliance cultivates Atlanta’s quickly growing neighborhood in commerce, culture, education and living. The Green Team, an extension of Midtown Green, which is Midtown Alliance’s eco-friendly program, specializes in the beautification of the area. The team is responsible for making repairs, cleaning the streets and landscaping along all 120 city blocks. It maintains about 30,000 total square feet of public spaces.

One Green Team member particularly loves the spring season. Ronald “Jay” Parker has been with the team for about six months. While everyone on the Green Team participates in all parts of the beautification process, Parker specializes in landscaping. Previously working in landscaping for 15 years, he jumped at the opportunity to work on making Midtown’s outdoor spaces happier places for everyone.

“I fell in love with Midtown right off the bat,” Parker said. “Everything you do, you leave your mark. Everything I do, I feel like, helps Midtown get just a little bit better. I take pride in it. When I leave at the end of the day, I like to think that, in my own little way, I made a difference in Midtown today.”

Parker’s work has not gone unnoticed. Ivan Zaragoza works at Colony Square Mall in Midtown, and he says that the cheerful surprise made him quite literally stop to smell the roses. “I was running late for work one day, and actually looked down and saw some tulips,” Zaragoza said. “I had to stop and take a few pictures. It got me excited because spring is one of my favorite seasons. Now, I get to see these flowers every day on my way to work.”

According to Parker, the tulip bulbs were planted somewhere around November or December 2021. The buds are just beginning to bloom, and there are more plans for the flowerbeds underway. Projects of this caliber require careful planning and research. According to Almanac.com, tulips take about 12 weeks to bloom once they’re planted, and they need to be planted during cold weather months. Once warmer temperatures start to rise in late winter or early spring, the bulbs will blossom into the bright and happy flowers dotting the sidewalks today. They work particularly well for this period of the year because they are relatively tolerant to cold temperatures, making them the perfect flower to battle the fluctuating temperatures that Atlanta experienced over the winter months.

Green Team Manager Jorge Cordero makes a lot of the decisions regarding the yearly calendar and the landscaping schedule of Midtown’s flowerbeds. He was unavailable for a comment, but Raleigh Wasser, the horticulturist at Atlanta Botanical Garden (ABG), described the multifaceted process.

“We spend so much time behind the scenes to make the Atlanta Blooms and seasonal color displays,” Wasser said. “For us, every single plant that we plant at ABG is considered for its bloom time, provenance, color, preferred growing conditions and other characteristics. It’s really the place where science meets art. However, it can get tricky because there are actually a lot of moving parts.”

Wasser said that the tulips at Atlanta Botanical Garden are planned nearly a year in advance. They acquire the bulbs around June, store the bulbs in a specialized cooler and then plant the bulbs around November. By the time mid-March rolls around, the flowers are ready to spread their petals, and the experts at ABG are preparing to make orders for the next round of bulbs.

So, no, the tulips did not just pop out of the ground this spring. It took the special care and handiwork of many passionate people to plan Midtown’s floral newcomers.