Tulip fever
The Tulip Garden: Growing and Collecting Species, Rare and Annual Varieties Polly Nicholson (Phaidon, £29.95)
SATIN-SHEENED tulips in all their myriad colours and forms will be unfurling across the country at this time of year. Few people are better placed to introduce us to their intoxicating variety than Polly Nicholson, who, in her garden at Blacklands in Wiltshire, has been growing them for 15 years and has amassed the largest private collection of historic Tulipa in the country. These have those dramatic streaks and feathered markings (a result of tulip breaking virus) that so enthralled the Dutch in the 16th century, but are not, warns Mrs Nicholson, for the lazy gardener.
This she is not. Her garden is filled with tulips, from some of the biggest cupped specimens I have ever seen to delicate little things in pots, such as the impossibly perfect scarlet Tulipa ‘Duc van Tol Cochineal’, which dates back to 1700, and the subtle charms of the multi-flowered Turkestan tulip.
Some are naturalised in grass; others are grown in beds for cutting. However, the current fashion for planting a lasagne or tiramisu of bulbs in one pot—in layers of different kinds—is frowned upon. ‘I am in agreement,’ she declares, ‘with John Parkinson who wrote in his Paradisi in Sole
Paradisus Terrestris (1629) that “if the sede lye one upon another, that it hath not roome upon the sprouting, to enter and take roote in the earth, it perisheth by and by”.’
Mrs Nicholson trained as a florist and her skill is captured in the sumptuous pictures by Andrew Montgomery. She offers a raspberry-and-white feathered English Florists’ Tulipa ‘Mabel’ in a Delft tulipière; the exuberantly wild arrangement of bruised lilac and purple historic tulips ‘Bleu Aimable’ and ‘La Joyeuse’ with irises and peonies in a glazed green jug is good enough to eat. Tiffany Daneff