The trick to long-lasting TULIPS

There’s a tulip for every type of border, says Monty Don, but many won’t reappear year after year. Here’s how to get more out of them

The tulips started to flower early in my own garden this year – but then what I call ‘early’ is mid season for those of you in the balmy south east and my late tulips – still flowering strongly now – will be barely in bud up where my sister lives in the north of Scotland.

Tulips have always been exotic. They arrived in Europe in the 1500s from Turkey where the court of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent revered them and had gardens devoted to them. But their adoration of the flower was as nothing compared to the ‘tulipmania’ that developed in the first part of the 17th century in Holland. Huge fortunes were won and lost as people paid up to 10 times the annual average income for a single bulb and gambled on the outcome of the coloration of a single flower as it ‘broke’, or acquired white streaks on its petals.

What they did not know then was that ‘breaking’ – this feathering of stripes on an otherwise solid-colour tulip – was the result of a virus that weakened the surface colour of the flower so that the underlying white or yellow layer showed through.

We now know that the virus is spread by an aphid that thrives in warm, damp, shady conditions – and that the Ottoman Turks would grow their tulips beneath the shade of fruit trees in their gardens. Thus the virus was spread to northern Europe in the first bulbs.

So much for history. The truth is that we now have a huge range of fabulous tulips for our gardens and I regard them as one of the great seasonal floral feasts for any gardener’s eyes. Early flowerers, late flowerers, parrots, lilyf lowered, triumph, viridif loras, species – I love them all. But although I do grow a lot in pots (over 50 planted up this year and it doesn’t seem one too many) and some for picking in a dedicated cutting bed, I like them best as part of mixed planting in a border. Their uprightness and the way that the colours sing out makes them adaptable and perfect companions for everything from shrubs to herbaceous perennials.

So I have – among many others – the lovely primrose- coloured ‘West Point’ in the Spring garden, the pinky- apricot ‘Apricot Beauty’ emerging from a blue mist of forget-me-nots in the Cottage Garden, the intense ‘Ballerina’, ‘Texas Flame’ and the rich purple ‘Black Parrot’ in our Jewel Garden and the subtle and calm ‘Spring Green’ in the Writing Garden surround- ed by a froth of white flowers. All are tried and tested combinations and used year after year.

But tulips, alas, cannot be relied on to appear again season on season. The existing bulb dies away and new bulbs tend to be smaller than the bought ones, with smaller and fewer flowers. Different types have different habits – ‘Ballerina’ will reappear for decades – but many are best treated as annuals and replaced.

I have a system that spreads the cost of this. All new bulbs are planted in containers so they can be positioned to exhibit the very best of them. Then, after flowering, they are lifted and replanted in a spare patch of ground to be used for cut flowers. If you do this, after a couple of years they develop large enough bulbs for these to be transplanted to a border where they stay.

However and wherever you grow your tulips, if you want them to flower at all next spring, nip off the seed head of all but species tulips planted in grass and this will make sure the energy goes into the bulb after flowering. It is essential that you do not cut back, tie or in any way reduce the foliage or flower stems but let them die back naturally as this will ensure the largest possible bulb for next year.

Monty with his ‘Ballerina’ tulips