Carol Klein talks tulips!
We’re captivated by them and they seem to be more popular than ever!
This year the world and his wife – especially his wife – have been growing tulips. Along with daffodils, they’ve been the most popular bulbs in cultivation for decades but this year it seems they’re even more ubiquitous than ever. Added to that, the weather has suited them perfectly – weeks of sunshine has enabled their glorious flowers in glowing, jewel-like colours to shine forth for weeks on end in parks and gardens around the country.
Of course, the brief interlude of snow and frost spoiled the show for some, but we’d already had weeks of enjoyment by that stage.
In the garden here, masses of tulip ‘Purissima’, with large, snowy blooms, excelled themselves. Brightest of the bunch was ‘Queen Wilhelmina’ in flaming orange, while first prize for the most sultry had to be awarded to Abu Hassan’.
What is it about tulips that has such a mesmerising affect on gardeners and even on the non-gardening public? The Turks, Ottomans and Dutch, to mention but a few, have fallen under their spell.
Most of us associate tulips with the Netherlands; the Dutch are by far the biggest producers of tulips both as bulbs and as cut flowers. More than three billion bulbs are produced there yearly, but they were only introduced to the country in the late 16th century. Only a few decades later the tulip almost ruined the Dutch economy, as bulbs of the famous ‘broken’ tulips were traded for vast sums on the first futures market! Ironically, nowadays its sales make a vital contribution to their economy.
However important they may be, for us gardeners, the main question is how to use them. As most of the tulips offered for sale are highly bred and hybridised, they’ve become very formal flowers. With the exception of the species that lend themselves to naturalisation, modern hybrid tulips look out of place growing in grass or on a rock garden. They’re frequently the basis of spring bedding displays, often treated as annuals and grown for a short but magnificent season. As spring bedding,
they’re often underplanted with forget-me-nots, forms of bellis and polyanthus. One of the most successful combinations is with wallflowers and the two are often at their peak simultaneously.
Try blood red wallflowers with ‘Negrita’ or lily-flowered ‘West Point’ in clear yellow, among blue forget-me-nots.
Such schemes demand careful thought and advance planning, both to buy and grow the right combination. Although wallflowers can be bought as young plants in bundles for transplanting in the autumn, they’re seldom sold as separate colours. If you grow your own plants there are several separate colours available as seed.
May or June is the ideal time to sow in little rows in the veg garden or a corner of a flower bed. When they’ve made sturdy little plants, dig them up and transplant them either into their final place or, better still, into a bare patch, where they can grow on before being transported to their position with tulips planted in between.
Each time you transplant wallflowers, it’s good practice to pinch out both the tap root and the growing tip to make bushier plants with more flowers.
Stories abound about tulips reappearing year after year but sadly mine never do! We’ve tried
them in the ground several times but even those that survive in their first year, after squirrels
and voles have tucked in, seldom make a repeat appearance.
Many gardeners plant tulips in herbaceous beds and borders. Here at Glebe Cottage, we grow almost all our tulips in pots. Tulips love good drainage, poor
and preferably alkaline soil, none of which we have here. They can be given the perfect diet in pots,
we use loam- based compost with extra grit and a little extra lime
added. They’re potted in October, sometimes November, and kept on our top terrace all winter. Our pets deter invading rodents!
All tulips need a period of cold and, almost without exception, enjoy sunshine. Neither of those are guaranteed but tulips are accommodating anyway. Most of ours do reasonably well. We grow different varieties but
never mix them. This maximises the impact and if you’re growing tulips, that’s what it’s all about.