Pick of the bunch Arundel Castle is poised for its annual Tulip Festival this month – with more than 36,000 colourful blooms on show, it promises to be a true floral spectacular

Each year, from mid April until mid May, the gardens of Arundel Castle in West Sussex explode with colour as the Tulip Festival provides one of the country’s most spectacular floral extravaganzas

In 16th-century Turkey, a tulip was said to be worth more than a human life. When tulip mania in the Netherlands reached its peak, just 100 years later, single bulbs sold for more than ten times the annual income of a skilled craftsman; land, houses, beds, clothes were sacrificed in exchange for one precious bulb. A sailor was thrown into a Dutch jail for mistaking a tulip bulb for an onion and eating it: the cost of such wanton gluttony equalling the cost of feeding an entire ship’s crew for 12 months.

Tulips continue to inflame passions today, but thankfully without the financial implications of the past. Probably just as well, especially if you are Martin Duncan, head gardener at Arundel Castle, who is responsible for planting the 36,000 tulip bulbs for this year’s Tulip Festival. From high on a hill in West Sussex, this great castle commands magnificent views of the South Downs, the River Arun, and 40 acres of garden, currently studded with tulips, thousands of brightly coloured gems sparkling in the spring sunshine. They are everywhere: carpeting the Wildflower Garden, peeking through the upturned roots of the Stumpery, sweeping over steep grass banks, marching in colourful ranks along long yew hedges. Above all, there are the pots, bold blocks of colour, jostling at the entrance to the Victorian vinery and peach house; but nowhere more magnificent than in the Collector Earl’s Garden. In a contemporary take on the formal Jacobean garden, designers Julian and Isabel Bannerman have created a gloriously Italianate piece of

Clockwise from top left

Box parterres in the Kitchen Garden with a vibrant profusion of tulips ‘Apeldoorn’s Elite’ and ‘Beauty of Apeldoorn’. Pots of ‘Purple Prince’ provide contrasting full stops en route. Behind is a mix of ‘White Dream’, ‘Annie Schilder’, ‘Don Quichotte’ and ‘Purple Dream’. A fiery Darwin Hybrid mix picks out the curves in the grass labyrinth in the Collector Earl’s Garden.

‘Apeldoorn’ flourishes on the grassy castle ramparts. Reliably perennial, this red Darwin Hybrid contrasts brilliantly with the white Narcissus ‘Thalia’. Drifts of tulips thread through the herbaceous borders, the colour palette shifting to reflect the moods in different areas of the garden. Here cultivars include ‘Purple Dream’, ‘Angélique’ and ‘Curly Sue’.

Tulips are everywhere: carpeting the Wildflower Garden, sweeping over steep grass banks, marching in colourful ranks along long yew hedges

Tulips are Martin’s abiding passion: singly, and as a complement to the rest of the planting… against the bravura backdrop of garden and castle