It starts in late April, just as the first blooms start to fall.
Keen eyes across campus track the movement of landscaping trucks.
The Notre Dame tulip harvest has begun.
Among University employees, the harvest holds almost myth-like status: each spring, the tulips are pulled from the many beds across campus and left for anyone interested in replanting the bulbs in their own gardens. Supposedly, homes across northern Indiana mark the arrival of spring with pops of color courtesy of these emancipated bulbs.
Of course, in five years of working at Notre Dame, I’ve never gotten a single one.
Landscape crews tell you to visit an unpaved lot north of campus, where they dump old branches, grass clippings and other debris, but in my experience, the best bulbs get intercepted long before arriving there. Making nice with Landscaping Services doesn’t hurt.
I’m not so discriminating as to seek out specific cultivars. The crimsons at the statue of Jesus on God Quad, the sunny orange and yellow alongside the Main Building, the Hesburgh Library purples, the Grotto whites — all are lovely and would be a welcome addition around our home.
This spring, I banded together with several coworkers to pool our resources to triangulate around the gardens, with a promise to divvy up any bulbs we’d obtain — all coordinated through a group chat we nicknamed “the Tulip Tribe.”
After a few false starts, last week we hit paydirt. While heading to a Friday morning coffee meeting at Cafe J., a colleague happened upon a crew working the gardens at the Main Gate on Notre Dame Avenue. One frantic scramble later, the Tulip Tribe had its first quarry of the spring.
The next day, another coworker heard from her husband, a campus usher working student move-out, that the Hesburgh Library flower beds were next on the docket. By the time I got there, the bulbs were long gone, but a chance encounter with a couple friendly guys with pitchforks cued me in on the motherlode: the Grotto tulips were getting pulled Sunday morning.
I arrived bright and early Sunday, garbage bags in tow, with my wife, Michelle, an associate editor of this magazine. I’ve heard stories of cutthroat feeding frenzies, old ladies throwing elbows over the withering stems. But the atmosphere on this sunny morning was bucolic, even lazy, and the few people who joined us to scavenge were kind and eager to share their tips on keeping the bulbs alive. When the 10 a.m. Mass at the Basilica let out, smiling families joined in, ready to root around the dirt in their Sunday best.
After this year’s harsh winter beatdown, spring’s sputtering arrival felt like the breath of life.
It’s a joy to watch Notre Dame fade into its seasonal floral regalia. Like the Holy Cross priests switching from Easter white vestments to the green of Ordinary Time, flowerbeds move from magnolias and hyacinths to irises and lilacs, a divinely orchestrated heartbeat of time. And each year, just as the more than 30,000 tulip bulbs across campus reach their peak, we arrive at final exams, move-out, Commencement. The cycle continues.
Someone with a wiser mind and greener thumb than I could surely find a lesson in the annual tulip hunt: something about joy and hope carrying us through the frustrating and frenetic search for bulbs, ultimately enlightening us to the ever-unfolding plan of the universe.
It’s silly, but in the same way one might steal a vial of sand from a beach, these bulbs feel like a souvenir to me, a touchstone of a place that’s touched me deeply. This is where I studied, met my wife, devoted a large piece of my working life. Memories, emotions, meaning — all traces of Notre Dame distilled into dirt and vegetation.
Now, walking the path to the Grotto, alongside the newly planted begonias and geraniums (whose hardier blooms will carry us well into the fall), I think of the bulbs drying on my porch at home. Once harvested like potatoes — pitchforked from the grudging earth and left in piles in the grass — now resting quietly, biding time until their next bright moment.
Sean Cuneo is a writer and aspiring gardener. He lives in South Bend in a house that, with a little luck, will be surrounded by tulips next spring.