Tulips are one of our most popular spring flowering bulbs, and a great deal has been written about them. Colette wrote about how to revive a cut tulip that is drooping. She said:

It is a pleasure sweet….to witness the rebirth of a tulip in a crystal goblet. If it receives watery aid in time, it is restored in the most dramatic fashion. Swooning with heat and thirst, their stalks, plunged into water, imbibe so much, so gracefully, that the energetic movement of the flower, its return to the vertical becomes visible, jerky at first and by fits and starts, when the head is too rich and too heavy. Before me a creation, interrupted by a transient death, raises itself towards perfection and will attain it, shine for a day, perish the next…

Collette's description is poetic but sometimes we can prolong the life of a cut flower like a tulip, by cutting the stem shorter and placing the flower in deep water in a tall narrow vase, which provides support and keeps the bloom upright.