Tulip suppliers

Queen of Night

I know, how can you even be bringing yourself to think about coming out of winter and into spring when it is September?

But you will not regret a bit of forward planning; gardeners rarely do.

I am not going to make any secret of the fact that I adore tulips. Daffodils can be cheerful (although I wish that councils would stop putting those unnatural bright yellow things in the verges) and occasionally a narcissus makes me go weak at the knees, but spring belongs to tulips for me.

But tulips are a little like clothes. There are the cheap and cheerful, the hard strong colours of scarlet red and sugar pink. Fast fashion. One season of colour and you’ll never see them again. There are the workhorses, the ones that are worth paying that little bit more for because they will last and oh my goodness, they will give joy. And then there are the designer pieces. You will wince when you type in the long card number on ordering, but these are something special. These are investment pieces.

What you are looking for will depend upon where you shop.

The first place to go is generally going to be Parkers. if you need sacks full of thousands of bulbs to fill big areas, to start a collection, for scale, then this is the most economical place to go. I say economical advisedly, and there are some caveats. I have found that if you buy late in the season, the quality of the bulbs can be a little off, although generally most recover. Also, you are never entirely sure what you are going to get. Every single year there is a horror story of a flower farmer who was nearly finished off because their 2000 Belle Epoque bulbs all came up sunshine yellow. If all honesty, I cannot account for their working practices because I simply cannot understand how they produce plants so cheaply. But if you are growing on a budget, I do not think you are going to be able to resist.

They do have a commercial site here, but they also have a wholesale/trade website here where you can apply for an account. There is a small charge if your order is under a certain cut off, but it is still a very economical way of buying large quantities, especially if you club together with some friends and neighbours.

So much for the cheap and cheerful. What about the beautiful? For excellent quality bulbs, lovely people, and excellent collections, I can wholeheartedly recommend Nyssens. One of the things that I especially like about them is that they do ready made collections based on some combinations put together by the incredibly tasteful Arne Maynard and printed in Gardens Illustrated. I am not ashamed to say that I grew the Burnt Toffee collection every year for about five years, until I couldn’t bear the pink of Albert Heijn any more. (I swear they got pinker every year.) However, if you are wondering where to start with combining varieties, you could do a lot worse. Just bear in mind that the Arne Maynard collections are designed to flower quite successsionally, so you won’t get all the colours together, they sort of flow from one into the other. Yes, I did learn this the hard way.

Now, the most exclusive. The big hitter. The ‘oh my god, you spent how much on a single bulb?’ one. Tulip fever was thing for a reason, and I am not immune. Jacques Amand is the place for the most beautiful, the most exclusive, the most perfect bulbs. Many are old and rare, and the captions often include the words ‘Seldom offered’ which makes any resistance I had entirely futile. I had the pleasure of seeing Absalon in real life at Bayntun Flowers last spring, and I will not forget it in a hurry. It was a bit like meeting a film star in real life, it was so beautiful it left me sort of speechless, but with an impression that this was the only reasonable reaction, and that it had been leaving people speechless for hundreds of years.

For some further recommendations for rare tulips, there is an article here by Arne which is photographed to perfection by Andrew Montgomery. You know I won’t press publish on this post until I have made sure my own order of Dom Pedro is on its way don’t you?

Some further thoughts on buying tulips:

If you have poorly draining soil, or you have had problems with tulips not thriving in previous years, consider pots. I am generally not a fan of container gardening because of all the tedious watering to be done, but I do love pots of tulips.

Blocks of single colours look incredible with tulips. A really good white (Mount Tacoma is a lovely white double, Alabaster is a lovely single), for those who need a bit of a lift after a long winter might want a trough full of bright red. I myself think that you can never go far wrong with a drift of Queen of Night (yes, I know it is irritating that it should be Queen of the Night, but it isn’t). I get these in by the truck load and they never ever disappoint. The wonderful Polly Nicholson of Bayntun Flowers who knows more about tulips that anyone else I have ever met plants different varieties in drifts and calls it the dolly mixture effect. I can’t carry that off, maybe because I don’t have the scale, but if you are courageous enough, give it a go.

There are rumblings that tulips are the one-use plastic of the plant world, simply because they so often do not come back and you have to keep buying them again. There are ways and means of getting them to return and many of mine do, year after year. if you have a Times newspaper subscription, my friend Caroline Duval wrote an article about it here. Because I don’t and I can’t remember entirely what it said from reading the proofs, I can’t give you all the tips, but I think it comes down to making sure you do not remove the foliage until it has died down completely, never letting them set seed, and making sure they get a lot of sun on them.