Sunday 27th April 2014

Like the Royal Year, so the Poor Little Rich Gay Year makes its inexorable progress, unchanging but with variations. Tulips, followed by Glyndebourniana, followed by Normandy, then the crawl towards Tuscany, then the return to the Capital to begin being Queen Mary all over again.

Tulips throb at the core of Poor Little Rich Gay life. The first flower of importance in the gardening year. Daffodils, although delightful, don’t count. They are charming but somehow idiotic, moronically huddling together like sheep. The tulip, on the other hand, is impossible, wilful and solitary. Their foliage means that they are constitutionally incapable of cosy-ing up to other tulips. The specimens grown today are some of the most artificial of all flowers. A wild daffodil is merely a little smaller and with less colour range that a cultivated one. But a wild tulip might well be thought by one who knew no better to be something else altogether.

This year I had a concept. I wouldn’t have contrasting tulips, I’d have them all the same but different varieties. In my front area I placed ‘Apricot Beauty’, ‘Cairo’ and ‘Princess Irene’. They were all supposed to be brown essentially. But I had forgotten that Apricot Beauty isn’t apricot at all. It’s pink. I forget this every year.

So here is my front area of brown tulips. ‘Cairo’, by the way, was recommended by Harry Rollo’s mother.