monique wrote:
But I was wondering how in the world do bulbs of tulips, lilies get
buried so deep. I never planted them that deep but they seem
to go deeper and deeper. Do they somehow sense how deep
they need to be in order to survive winter?

I believe that at the end of their growing season, the roots of many
bulbs and contract, pulling the bulbs/corms deeper into the soil. This
is especially true of plants which form new bulblets or corms at th tops
of the old ones.

M. Reed

Alright lets call your hypothesis the (1) "Root Contracting
Hypothesis" to explain
how bulbs end up deeper than initially planted.

Let me offer two other hypotheses worth checking into:

(2) The bulb in spring grows below the bulb of the previous season
where
the entire bulb of a spring season acts as a root, and roots grow
deeper into
the soil. So we think of the bulb as a root itself and roots grow
deeper. Conceivably
an old bulb could find its way too deep and thus die in that season.

(3) Let us call this hypothesis the "Action has an equal and opposite
reaction".
That bulbs have to press upwards of their leaf tissue and in so doing
of pressing
upwards that the opposite reaction is to press the bulb itself
downwards deeper
into the soil.

Now today I dug up and transplanted some tulips that had been planted
in fine
topsoil of little to no clay present and they had been there for 20
years and were
rather shallow. So it seems as though the bulbs in a clay soil tend to
end up deep
into the soil. And if that is true, it would seem to favor Hypothesis
#3 in that
the action of the shoots trying to get up and out of the soil puts a
pressure on the
bulb to go deeper.

Be rather interesting to experiment on this, if someone has the time
and patience.
But it may also have an answer as to why some bulbs die in a few years
while
others can thrive for 20 years. The answer maybe all in whether it is
clay soil
or not clay.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies