Use alliums to bridge the June gap between the flowers of spring and the summer flowering perennials. Even when your garden borders are bright with colour in June from Euphorbias, Geums and Iris there is still a role for alliums. Their round pompom flower heads are larger than tennis balls and contrast boldly both in …
The Ottoman Empire, in a similar way to Holland, had a fanatical obsession with tulips. Needle-shaped flowers were prized of which Tulipa acuminata is an example. This wild species tulip flowers later than most. Its flower petals drawn out into long fine points are yellow splashed with orange and red marks. In one way the …
The Amsterdam Tulip Museum is a welcome resource for anyone interested in tulips and who happens to be visiting the capital of the Netherlands. Now they have started to share their knowledge and information online at https://amsterdamtulipmuseumonline.com My earlier post gave some impression of the quality of the museum and its shop and to support their …
I have just released a new eBook on tulips. Without tulips many perennial meadow and naturalistic planting schemes would be very dull at the beginning of spring. I mix them into my borders, dropping them into any spaces I find between the perennials. In spring they flower amidst the emerging foliage and sometimes the flowers …
As you can see bulbs, and in particular tulips, are amongst my favourite flowers. However, six years ago I hit a big problem; mice and voles started eating the bulbs – every single one of them. In that year I had carefully planted over eight hundred tulip bulbs individually amongst the garden’s perennials! I resorted …
Naturalistic planting and especially the prairie planting variant can look very flat and green in spring. Often these schemes are filled with perennials that flower in summer and look wonderful with ornamental grasses, but in spring they are green. Red is the complementary colour to green and tulips are one of the ways to introduce …
Plants in their season can bring spectacle to the garden when used boldly. I search for such players in my gardens and use them repeatedly, at numerous intervals throughout the planting – I call them the theme plants in my perennial meadows. In my recent posts I suggested mid-season daffodils as the leading theme plants for late …
Seasonal Highlights in the Perennial Meadow Garden For more than three weeks the weather has been cold, wet and very windy here in the Netherlands, but now it is Easter and it feels like the gardening season has begun. The nights are still cold, but the days are calm and sunny and daffodils dominate the …
National Tulip Day 2013 It was only a week ago that I was writing about our mild winter in Holland and advising you not to miss the boat and get on with cutting back cold season grasses. Well since then winter has arrived here in the Netherlands, people are sharpening their ice skates and the …
There are two good reasons to mix together different varieties of tulips at planting time. Firstly, by selecting early, mid-season and late flowering varieties you can create a splash of colour lasting maybe six or more weeks long, rather than the two to three weeks that a single variety would offer. Secondly, I always see …