TULIPS
"I wish I was more generous with tulips". Emma Bridgewater talks
about Tulips
As spring’s most glamorous flower from blousy tumbling parrots to slick and silky black Queen of night they are deeply desirable. My great friend Sarah Raven is a good ambassador for the tulip and they glow temptingly from the pages of her catalogue. Seeing them there I can imagine them either in grand drifts in the grass or massed in tight formation in the kitchen garden. Either way I'm sure that the requirement is Quantity. Half a dozen nodding giants just look silly and twenty pretty red faces in an area of long spring grass can sometimes look a little like litter. So hundreds it must be, bold swathes and blocks dominating the garden from April till early May........ But this is not how it actually is. Poor shopping and probably rather inadequate aftercare has led to fairly modest groups of flowers that JUST make themselves heard above the acid green clamour of spring or the dank brown of the kitchen garden. A surprise showing of second year orange tulips have reappeared in a group of pots by the veranda but as ever their second year is a quiet reprise of their initial thunder. Next year we will be gardening in Oxford. Perhaps a town garden, which could not be a tenth the size of our lovely but straggling Norfolk surroundings, will allow for rather more tulip fireworks in spring 09.
That being a possibility it will be necessary to follow Sarah’s instructions to plant deep. This is so completely counter-intuitive that it is jolly hard to make yourself do. Planting bulbs is anyway rather a leap of faith, burying those bulbs in September or October with no hope of seeing anything at all for six months to be chomped on by drowsy slugs or mice fattening up for the winter is always a bit of a problem . But making that hole at least six inches deep feels really ODD. Matthew, who actually does all the work in the garden and is anyway a little less frantically keen on flowers than veg, does plant them in the approved fashion and it seems to work. Our best bit of tulip gardening has now worked for some years. This is the inter-planting of black tulips with a long row of purple sage. This is not as fiddly as it sounds as the sage really needs replacing every three years to avoid it getting too woody. Matt takes cuttings from semi-ripe wood in July which are ready to plant out the following spring at which point the tulips are just poking through the surface. They grow together and the silky black tulips look lovely coming out of the dusty purple leaves of the sage to be replaced by its own flowers in early June. The subsequent two years only require the sage to be dead headed and kept tidy. After the third year the whole lot can be scrubbed and started again.
Tulips in grass are a completely different treat and something that HRH The Prince of Wales has done to great effect in his garden at Highgrove. We had a picnic some years ago in an olive grove outside Florence. In the dappled shade of the olives the grass was so densely scattered with grape hyacinths and tiny red tulips that it was genuinely difficult to put out the picnic without crushing some. Somehow every wildflower meadow here has become dominated by coarse grasses, buttercup, dock and plantain and the more decorative flowers have not had a look in. I think that our soil is a bit too good and too heavy for this project so tulips in grass will have to remain a memory for us in Norfolk.
See the full range of Emma Bridgewater pottery and accessories at www.emmabridgewater.co.uk Purchase from the Emma Bridgewater website until 1st June 2008 using the promotion code: Tulips and 5% of your purchase value will be donated to the NGS by Emma Bridgewater
Click here for Emma's favourite gardens
Click here for Emma and Hellebores