The tulips are looking great. If I were an oligarch I wouldn't bother buying a premier league football club, but I should like one of those gardens where every year 10,000 tulip bulbs were planted. As it is I have a dozen pots of them. I love tulips in all their manifestations, as bunches of flowers for the house, and Blom's magnificent display at Chelsea (the stress each year. Will this be the first time in about 65 years that they don't get awarded a Gold Medal?), but tulips outdoors have an extra beauty because the sun can shine through their petals. You can see where the petals overlap at the base of each flower by the arc of darker colour, sharply demarcated from the luminous area of single thickness of petal above. Viewed close up the petals glisten and have a striated surface texture like polished steel.
I went for bright colours again this year. The soft pinks and whites are pretty, but the hot reds and oranges are more exciting. First to open was 'Red Impression', a classic goblet shaped tulip in bright red, with a black blotch at the base of each petal. These are still looking good, but starting to lean and weave in different directions. It is a Darwin hybrid. I tried to pick varieties that would open over a period, to give me a longer season, and it should in theory have been behind the Triumph tulips, as the Triumphs are supposed to open mid to late April and the Darwins late April to mid May, but never mind. Triumph tulips are also the traditional tulip shape, and I went for 'Orange Sun', 'Abu Hassan', 'Jan Reus' and 'Negrita'. 'Orange Sun' is very much at the red end of the orange spectrum, with a silvery reverse to the petals, and the effect is warm and soft and not at all glaring. 'Abu Hassan' is a deep brownish-purple, with yellow edges and bases to the petals. 'Jan Reus' is a lovely deep burgundy, and again the backs of the petals have a hint of silver. 'Negrita' is a rich mid-purple.
Last to open are the Lily Flowered tulips, with their elegant pointed petals. The first flower has just opened in one pot of 'Ballerina', which is a warm apricot, lifted by the yellow stamens and basal blotch. The other Lily Flowered variety is 'Red Shine', and that hasn't opened at all yet.
I got them all from Peter Nyssen, a whosesaler which has also sold to members of the public for many years. Christopher Lloyd repeatedly recommended the firm in his books, which is where I picked up the name. The minimum quantity you can buy of one tulip variety is 25 bulbs, which does two 33cm pots nicely. The cheapest ones were £16 per hundred bulbs last season, which equates to £4 per 25 and £2 per pot. Buying tulips in packets from garden centres, or from the wonderful Bloms, it is easy to pay 45-50p per bulb, which comes to over £5 per pot. In the old City days it was a great game to go around the Bloms stand with an order form, ticking the boxes against the names of the ones I liked, and then forgetting about it until autumn when a large box of tulip bulbs arrived, together with the bill. Nowadays I make sure I choose Peter Nyssen's cheapest varieties, many of which are very good, just not the newest and trendiest. It's tough on Bloms, as I still look at their lovely Chelsea exhibit, and Peter Nyssen doesn't do one of those.
The tulips were potted last November in ordinary multi-purpose compost, and stood outside all through the winter weather. Unlike the potted hyacinths, they are absolutely fine. That is more than can be said for the pots. I used to use traditional clay pots, around the 33cm size, and got fed up with them blowing over, so a couple of years ago I bought some broader based, shorter ones from B&Q. They are 33cm at the top, but only 25cm across the base and 25cm tall. The proportions look very nice, in fact, and they give adequate rooting depth for tulips Unfortunately they were not sufficiently weather proof. None of them have cracked, but the rims are flaking off. I think I need to plan ahead, and buy a set of plain pots for bulbs from Whichford Pottery, if they have a winter sale as usual, except that that will be after the point when I should have planted the bulbs.
In the gravel, dwarf tulips are bringing the miniature bulbs season to its conclusion. These are reasonably persistent, at least in our free draining gravel. They are all so pretty, I tend to choose them as well on the basis of going for the species and varieties where I can afford to get 25 rather than 3.
Addendum I wrote that Geranium maculatum 'Chatto' had flowers in a dreamy shade of pale blue, which is how I remembered them. Then I found the label on the kitchen table, and it said that the flowers were pink, so I went outside and had a look at them. I'm not sure whether they should be called pink or blue. They are a pale lavender with veining, which in some lights is definitely pink, but in others a soft blue in the way that blue clematis almost always have some pink in them. It just goes to show that you should have the plant in front of you while writing about it. I couldn't be bothered to set up an extension cable so that I could sit in front of the tulips to blog about them (laptop battery life nowadays approx 3 minutes) but I did go out (with a clipboard) and take notes before sitting down to write.
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