If it’s spring time on Wichita State’s campus, there are tulips.
The tradition stretches back decades, and Lowell Kauffman is the latest landscape supervisor to help it continue.
His team worked together for weeks last fall to plant nearly 9,000 bulbs in neat rows in flower beds across campus.
By spring, Kauffman said, the tulips provide a magnificent display of color after a gloomy winter.
“We're always anticipating the new life and the beauty of the flowers,” Kauffman said.
As in years before, there are yellow tulips at many of the campus entrances. The gardeners also have fun with different and new varieties in flower beds near Morrison Hall.
But the mainstay will always be the red tulips at the beloved Millie the Millipede statue near the Ulrich Museum of Art.
According to gardener Dallas Bowman, Millie is one of the biggest undertakings … and the most rewarding.
“Millie is one of the most interactive statues that there is,” she said. “I've seen numerous families out here taking family photos, pictures with their kids.
“I've seen a couple of school classes interacting with Millie and interacting with the flowers and doing little projects with them.”
That’s exactly what was happening during this interview. Several art students were experimenting with tintype photography.
Using the different colored tulips, students like Rylee Jerke were able to see the different ways the film would develop on the thin metal plates.
“We found a lot of inspiration in the tulips,” Jerke said. “Mainly in the colors that they express, specifically, the yellow and red ones.
“The red ones turned out really dark, whereas the yellow ones turned out very light. And they gave a great contrast in the background of a lot of our photos.”
Gardener Cass Standley said it’s experiences like Jerke’s that make the hard work worthwhile for the gardening crew, especially because the tulips are only on display for a few weeks.
“When they do show up, it's really striking,” Standley said, “and it kind of makes you stop and pause and slow down and appreciate the season and appreciate the color.”
During the interview in early April, some tulips were already withering away. In other areas, they were just starting to come up.
With weather patterns changing, the crew said it’s hard to tell what will happen with the gardens when spring arrives.
“It's just a really complicated science,” Bowman said. “They thrive when it's just a very consistent change in weather, when it's not a roller coaster like what we've had recently. So hopefully, next season will be more steady.”
As spring moves on, Standley will begin preparing the garden beds to plant native summer plants in time for graduation next month.
That means Standley and the other landscaping crew members pull up the tulip bulbs and leave them around campus for other aspiring gardeners to take home, helping to spread a WSU tradition around town.
“You're talking about a little piece of campus that people can take home with them,” Standley said. “Last year, I took some of the bulbs that we dug up to my mom, and she planted them in her bed. And so now, they're coming back up and that was really cool to see.”
