Sunday 3^rd April 2011

Barely a second since the last tulip season but here they are again, advanced  in my front area not least by the steam from my steam-condensing boiler, an installation inspired by Bruce MacBain, my personal architect.

I had planned, for my front area, a combination of ‘Princess Irene’, bronze-gold with a strange lick of dull purple, ‘Coleur Cardinal’, a really good church red and ‘Apricot Beauty’, speaks for itself. It was always going to be controversial. The first thing that happened was two perfectly monstrous knicker-pink outrages appeared, not ‘Apricot Beauty’, and no sign of any of the others. Then a whole lot more, actual ‘Apricot Beauty’, followed by, but really too late to combine, an unordered white tulip, the odd, intended ‘Princess Irene’ and ‘Coleur Cardinal’ as expected. With ‘Apricot Beauty’ largely over in some pots, I’ve ended up therefore with a perfectly serviceable but just a little municipal red and white scheme.

Two things went wrong: Amand of Clamp Hill, Stanmore incorrectly described ‘Apricot Beauty’ as a mid-season tulip when it is in fact early. But if I’d planted the bulbs on their sides they might have been delayed sufficiently to flower with the other two.  Otherwise Amand muddled up the varieties. box.

It’s all very well, but how many tulip seasons have I left? It could be only twenty, or thirty or none.

Tulips are absolutely preferred by Poor Little Rich Gays to daffodils. Why? There’s quite a lot wrong with them. They have unwieldy leaves, which can get battered or eaten or in other ways unsightly, and which also mean that the bulbs can’t be planted very close together. The display is always rather sparse. Daffodils, on the other hand, which I’ve been secretly growing on my upstairs terrace, acquired at rock-bottom prices in February from Columbia Road, keep their leaves out of the way until after flowering and can be packed together in a delightful festive mass.

But they’re yellow, on the whole. Sebastian Archer and Robert Nevil once nearly fell into their private lake at the mention of a yellow flower. And altogether too cheerful and straightforward, dancing away in the wind, as Wordsworth required.

Tulips are solitary, dignified, just a little cold, and not yellow (with exceptions). The stems don’t move but the flowers behave in a very odd way, opening up almost to the point of disintegration in the sun and deepening in colour, before reverting to their new-born state in the evening. The proud single blooms, rising above their disgraceful foliage, demand careful inspection of their strange, unlikely, unapparent markings.

Difficult, high, not quite right, superb, Tulips are not as others.

'Apricot Beauty' in the Foreground, 'Coleur Cardinal' to the Left, Unknown White, then another 'Apricot Beauty' gone quite Red in the Sun

'Apricot Beauty' Gone Red in the Sun, one 'Princess Irene' Lurking

'Coleur Cardinal' and Unknown White Tulip

'Princess Irene' Solo

'Coleur Cardinal' Solo