Tulips great and small
Tulips great and small
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Crocus corms, newly bought, should have been planted by now. So should narcissi, but I confess to breaking these rules.
Sometimes I plant crocus corms when they are already showing a new white shoot, the source of their leaves and flowers in the following spring. If these shoots are handled carefully and if the corms are planted with about 2 inches of soil above their upper hard surface, they will survive a late planting, even as late as November.
Ten years ago I planted some newly bought narcissi on Christmas Eve, knowing that none of you were watching. They were a free-flowering narcissus, Jetfire, and they flowered generously in the following spring. They have repeated the display every year since then.
If you have crocuses or narcissi still in packs or bags, open them and keep them in a dry, unheated place. The sooner they are planted, the better, but unless they become damp they will put up with bad practice, a naughty secret.
Tulips, by contrast, are happy to wait. Their bulbs must be kept dry, but not hot, as heat will shrivel them. They can be planted in mid November or even, in a crisis, a week or two later. Do not worry if their brown outer tunics drop off, so long as there are no signs of blue-green mould on the white bulb itself. If you want tulips to brighten your borders in spring it is helpful to wait until the top growth of border plants can be cut down and all the annual bedding plants can be pulled out, making space for patches of tulips instead. Twelve or so in each patch suffice.
I divide tulips into two categories, low and high, those which sometimes spread and those which shoot a fusillade. I will take the low ones first, beginning with tulips I saw in late February running wild beside a ditch with historic connections.
At the great site of Taxila, now in Pakistan, Alexander the Great and his army once took control of the city. There is even more of interest there since he arrived in 326BC, including a fine museum, superb early Buddhist stupas and long traffic jams of gaily painted lorries, backed up so far that the circular roads round London seem like racetracks by comparison.
Under a fine plane tree I sat with the distinguished archaeologist Abdul Hameed and prepared for our day’s tour of Taxila’s accessible antiquities with expert Sayed Gul Kalash. We were drinking tea by the house of Sir John Marshall, who had been made director-general of The Archaeological Survey of India by Lord Curzon in 1902. As his admirer Sir Mortimer Wheeler used to recall, Curzon appointed Marshall in error, mistaking him for a namesake, but nonetheless, Marshall became a titan of archaeology at Taxila and other famous sites in what is now Pakistan.
Under a pure blue sky, we looked out past the gates of Marshall’s garden to a bank of conspicuously green grass. The bank was kept damp by water from a stream below and on its far side cherry-red-and-white-striped flowers on slim stems were visible above the grass, about a foot high. They were Lady tulips, examples of its wide distribution.
Tulipa clusiana grows wild in Spain, in Turkey and elsewhere, but extends through Iran into Pakistan, where I had never expected them. In the ditch outside Marshall’s gates the Lady tulip had not been introduced by his wife Lady Marshall, who also ran free, albeit to escape archaeological life. It is a wild presence, spreading because of the water below its bank.
Clusiana commemorates the Dutch botanist Clusius, who introduced it to gardeners from a source in Florence. Nobody is sure why it was called the Lady tulip, but gardeners have several choices, each of which varies the wild plant’s pattern of cherry-red-and-white petals.
A popular one is Tulipa clusiana Cynthia, available from Avon bulbs, among others. It is distinguished by a yellow tinge to the white insides of its petals. Another is Lady Jane, selected for the clarity of the cherry red on the exterior of its white flowers. Squirrels permitting, Lady Jane persists surprisingly well in gardens if planted about 3in deep with horticultural grit below and around its small bulbs.
Clusiana commemorates the Dutch botanist Clusius, who introduced it from a source in Florence. Nobody is sure why it was called the Lady tulip
Best of all is Peppermintstick, also cherry red and white, but selected for its particular vigour: it even has an RHS Award of Garden Merit, attesting the ease with which it grows (sarahraven.com is one supplier). Try some Peppermintsticks, as I have, and then picture their relations wilding themselves in Pakistan.
I have classified big tulips as a fusillade. Here is why. In a fine poem, composed in 1651-52, Andrew Marvell played with the history and appearance of the house and grounds of his patron, Thomas Fairfax, who had recently retired as a commander of Oliver Cromwell’s army. Gout and wounds impeded Fairfax’s walks round the garden of his Appleton House in Yorkshire, but in order to amuse him Marvell plays with the contrast of war and peace by presenting roses, pinks and tulips as a regiment on parade. Striped tulips, he tells him, "in several colours barred", are guards in uniform, peacefully on duty in the garden.
Marvell’s job was to teach European languages to Mary, daughter of the multilingual Fairfax. She inspired him to yet more poetic play on flowers and beauty. In my garden I think of these regimented and barred tulips as tall tulips in the Darwin hybrid class, especially the excellent Olympic Flame. Its flowers are a fine mid-yellow flamed with streaks of red, like a camp inflamed by the general’s siege.
In another poem Marvell makes his speaker, a mower with a scythe, regret that "luxurious man" has seduced nature by transplanting it. In rich soil, he complains, the tulip, formerly white, has tried to enhance its complexion and has "learned to interline its cheek". To illustrate the point I recommend the lily-flowered tulip Marilyn. Its elongated flowers are indeed white, striped, however, with red like lipstick.
Planters of tulips look forward to spring despite the hazards of slugs, mice and squirrels. Plant tulips for your fusillade with at least 4in of soil above the top of each bulb and put a little dusting of dry fertiliser under the bulb itself. Reading, travel and pictures enhance what gardeners can see in tulips in spring, but bone meal, applied beneath them, helps too.
I have not always been faithful to them. After two consecutive hot and sunny Aprils I was talked into using ornamental onions, or alliums, instead. Their flowers indeed last much longer in warm weather and although their leaves are untidy they are often beginning to turn brown when the flowers open on tall stems and can be cut back without doing harm to next year’s show.
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