Nick Bailey has some top tips for tulips
Follow my tips for a spring display that’s spellbinding
It’s here! That exciting season when all the bulb catalogues start arriving. I must confess to an all-consuming passion for these plants. There’s something magical about how a papery brown blob can produce large, vibrant blooms. Tulips top my list of spring bulbs. Sure, they may not last as long as other bulbs, but when they do their thing there isn’t a more glorious sight. I love experimenting with them, trying new forms and trialling combinations. Here are some of the best and how to make the most of them on your plot.
To naturalise
Most highly hybridised tulips are unlikely to naturalise as their seed is often not viable or they won’t come true from seed they do set. However, several of the species tulips will slowly self-seed over many years and gradually colonise an area. The easiest of these is Tulipa sylvestris. It’s a muted yellow form, often with a swan neck, and enjoys the dappled shade of a woodland edge. More challenging, and quite a costly investment upfront, is T. acuminata. This wondrous creature barely looks like a tulip with its twisted, skinny, vertical petals in red and yellow but it’s elegance personified. Bulbs will set you back up to £5 each but once it starts to self-seed and naturalise in your borders a fiver won’t seem so steep.
For small pots
There are a few dinky tulips suited to small pots. T. tarda is a short yellow which is fine, but for me the top pint-sized performer is ‘Little Beauty’. Flowers are blue in the centre suffusing though white into red. It’s a really special plant. For early colour The classic, early-flowering squat tulip is ‘Red Riding Hood’, but for something less run-of-the-mill try ‘Show winner’. It’s a cinch to grow and will be in bloom by mid March. Its glossy, red petals are a wonderful respite against the dank remnants of winter.
For late colour
Though many Darwin tulips will push on into May, the variety guaranteed to flower, virtually till the end of the month, unless we get crazy high temperatures, is the near-black ‘Queen of Night’. This much-loved tulip will also often return year after year.
For repeat-flowering
To get flowers every year, which many tulips don’t do, opt for the lily-flowered forms such as ‘Ballerina’, viridifloras, dark parrots or species tulips. They tend to be more perennial than many other forms.