An interview with Polly Nicholson
Before I start with this interview with one of the truly inspiring leading lights of the British flowers world, I want to offer one of the most significant accolades that one can in this digital age. My desktop image on my laptop is a photograph of Polly’s utterly glorious tulips (above), as featured in an article in Gardens Illustrated by Arne Maynard. In this world of imagery, I can offer no higher praise.
This first photo is by Andrew Montgomery, all other pictures in this interview are by Britt Willoughby Dyer and used with her very kind permission.
Hello! For those who don’t know you, could you just tell us a little bit about you, your flowers, your garden and your growing space?
I am a 50 year old mother of 4, happily married and fortunate to live in a beautiful house with a series of walled gardens. I have a specialist, organic cut flower business called Bayntun Flowers, which I run with a small team. These facts are important to me for the following reasons:
50 is an important milestone age, even though it was reached very quietly in lockdown, and I love the experience and maturity that it represents. I may not feel either of those things all of the time, or even much of it, but a half century affords the confidence to at least pretend to be mature and experienced.
My family are at the centre of everything I do and integral to my motivation to work. I come from a long line of independent working women, and the idea of ‘doing nothing’ is alien to me. I want to set a good example to my three daughters (and one poor son), so that they aspire to having their own interests and careers and put their education to use. My husband spent the early years of our marriage travelling extensively for his job, while I was based at home with babies, and since we moved to Wiltshire he has made it a priority to encourage and enable me to concentrate on my own career.
The house and garden are the reason we moved to Blacklands, and are the aesthetic and practical backdrop to the business. I started off by being slightly intimidated by the scale of my surroundings, but I have grown into the spaces around me and made them my own. After the initial refurbishment of the house fifteen years ago we moved outwards into the garden, enlisting the invaluable help of Arne Maynard to create structure and cohesion, and have now brought the parkland and pasture beyond the garden boundaries into our curtilage. This last winter has seen a comprehensive planting of parkland trees including disease resistant Ulnus (Dutch elm), Populus nigra (black poplar), three different varieties of Quercus (oak) and a range of Salix (willow) banked along the edges of the river Marden which bisects the property.
The business, Bayntun Flowers, was ‘branded’ by Athena at Meticulous Ink (www.meticulousink.com) a few years ago, formalising what I was doing already, which was filling the garden with flowers. After the first few years of growing I realised that I couldn’t carry on doing everything by myself, the ordering, sowing, propagating, irrigating, staking, feeding, weeding, deadheading, picking, conditioning, bunching, selling, delivering and marketing, so gradually built up a team who by accident or design are all women. Our head gardener Hannah (surname Gardner) leads the team and is supported by four others who each work one or two days a week; two are trainees, two bring with them a wealth of experience. Together they are a force to be reckoned with, and they have taken over the majority of the growing side while I am left to do the rest.
Despite having a fair number of employees, I describe the business as small because compared to many flower farms, we really are, and I want to keep it that way. The dedicated growing space totals no more than an acre or so, although I do incorporate additional flowers to cut all over the garden and I constantly gather from the fields, trees and hedgerows. Rather than focus on volume of output, we concentrate on growing a succession of specialist crops in the best possible way we can: slowly, naturally, organically. We have a heated greenhouse for propagating, an unheated polytunnel for early indoor crops, and everything else is grown outside in a walled garden and a fenced off area of field.
I would happily keep all the flowers we grow, but that wouldn’t pay the wages and certainly wouldn’t allow me to fork out for new bulbs year on year, so I sell some of them wholesale to local florists (such as Lindsey at The White Horse Flower Company) and the bulk of them to London event florists, the best being Shane Connolly. I create hand-tied bunches for private local customers to come and collect and I do my own small-scale floristry. Workshops and study days are an important part of the seasonal calendar, providing income and an injection of expertise from the specialists who come to lecture, and we hold regular charity days – this year we are opening in aid of the National Garden Scheme on 22nd April and 1st May (www.ngs.org.uk pre-booking only, search for Blackland House), and are holding two days in conjunction with the Garden Museum in Lambeth.
April 1st this year was a landmark date, because it marked the end of our two year conversion with the Soil Association UK – we are now fully approved and recognised and can display the logo left, right and centre, something I have yet to do. We were gardening to organic principles for several years, so it seemed logical to sign up, although the amount of paperwork involved came as a bit of a shock. Hannah has taken this on with good grace, and left me to apply to become a holder of the National Collection of Historic Tulips with Plant Heritage, which comes with its own reams of paperwork.
Our goal is to leave our garden and the land surrounding it a richer, healthier and more diverse environment than we inherited (or more precisely bought) it. We cannot directly control the world around us, but we can effect a degree of control on the land around us, and we do this by planting trees, shrubs, flowers, cover crops and looking after the soil. To eliminate weeds we mulch, burn, weed by hand and in extreme circumstances borrow pigs to root out the worst offenders such as ground elder. To irrigate the garden and tree plantings we use water pumped from a bore hole or drawn from the river, within the extraction limits allowed. We haven’t yet found an environmentally friendly solution to irrigate the flower field, apart from harvesting what rainwater we can from the polytunnel roof, so we do this reluctantly with mains water. To help aid pollination we keep black British bees, to fertilise the roses we use our own (GMO free) horse manure, to graze the parkland we have established a flock of hebridean sheep. Pesticides and chemical fertilisers were banished from our potting shed years ago, to be replaced by a range of soft soaps and nematodes for pest control with a range of organic feeds and home-produced composts to feed the soil.
I have been evaluating whether growing organically has affected the choice of flowers which we now specialise in. I think it has to a certain extent, insofar as I don’t grow rows of lilies because I can’t spray them with repellent for lily beetle, but I do grow martagons in the woodland beds where they seem unaffected, and in a large trough by the potting shed where everybody can check them on a daily basis and squash between finger and thumb as necessary. If Shane Connolly asks for martagons I will cut a few, but he is not greedy with his quantities so that works for us and for him. In the same vein we only have around 50 rose bushes, which is more than enough to tend organically, and we send wedding customers straight to The Real Flower Company (www.realflowers.co.uk) or Rosa Cheney (www.rosachency.com) who grow on a larger scale.
Listing everything we do grow in substantial, healthy quantites for cutting would take make for slow reading, so I will stay seasonal and limit myself to the Spring flowers here. The season kicks off in March with Galilee anemones and Striato ranunculus from the polytunnel, overlapping with outdoor narcissi (around 24 different cultivars) and fritillaria (F. Imperialis, Persica, Meleagris, Uva-vulpis, Raddeana, Michailovskyi and Davidii). We have accumulated an interesting collection of species, herbaceous and intersectional peonies (which I class as spring flowers) and too many alliums to use.
However spring is really about tulips here at Bayntun Flowers. Tulips are our main specialist crop, and we plant them here, there and everywhere – there are short rows in the walled garden, long runs sheltering under hoops in the flower field and containers packed full of them dotted across the length and breadth of the garden. These are what I call our annual crop, the bulbs which we buy, grow and throw (or more accurately compost or replant back-of-house) every year. In addition to these c.10,000 bulbs we supplement all the perennial plantings by around 30%, add to the species collections, and replant all the historics. The historics are a complete labour of love, my love, and it is lucky I do love them so much as they are extremely painstaking to grow. Each year we wait for them to finish flowering, deadhead the whole lot, and let the foliage die back. Some time in midsummer, weather dependent, they are all dug up by hand, counted, sorted, labelled in racks, and left to dry for the next few months. Late autumn we clean each bulb and grade the bulblets, and plant and label them all over again.
All 3,000 of them.
You are known for your love of tulips and I have to admit, you introduced me to a level of tulips that I didn’t appreciate enough. Seeing Dom Pedro in your garden for the first time a few years ago was a truly memorable experience. How did (historic) tulips come to be so important in your life?
Tulips were the first flowers that I grew when we moved to Wiltshire in the autumn of 2007, and their appearance through the black, loamy soil the following spring made me feel as though I had arrived. I had undertaken a horticultural diploma at The English Gardening School a few years earlier, and we had had a long, narrow garden attached to our previous house in London, but never any sizeable beds to fill. Tulips were a quick fix confidence builder, but they captured my heart. Suffice to say I ordered more the following year, and the year after that. With over 3,000 tulip varieties currently registered it was easy to get carried away and I did – ordering up to 15,000 a year at one point to fill the flower field and containers around the garden.
My fascination with historic tulips perhaps came as an antidote to the glut of modern tulips which the catalogues throw at us each year. Historic tulips, or Florists’ tulips (the word florist being used in the old sense, meaning a flower grower who exhibits their flowers, as opposed to a floral designer) are notoriously hard to grow, generally producing very few bulblets or daughter bulbs, and are prone to Tulip Breaking Virus, or TBV, which causes solid coloured breeder bulbs to ‘break’ into broken or Rembrandt bulbs. Without going into a lengthy lesson (for that I highly recommend The Tulip by Anna Pavord, the best book written on tulips) TBV weakens the tulip until it eventually stops producing new bulblets, and that variety of tulip becomes extinct. The most famous extinct tulip of all is T. Semper Augustus, with striking blood red streaks against a white ground, and reputed to be the most valuable tulip to be sold during the period of Tulipmania in Holland between 1634-1637.
The historic bulbs I grow date back to the early 1600s and can be seen as endangered species, rare breeds that need to be nurtured to prevent them following the fate of so many of their ancestors. And these tulips do indeed have a feel of antiquity to them which is unrivalled in any of the modern cultivars. Dom Pedro, a rich coffee brown with maroon undertones is a fine example of this. It compares well with the almost-black Queen of Night in terms of stem length, head size and vase life, yet easily surpasses it with regards to its depth of shine and intensity of colour. It has a well-worn patina to it, as if it has been buffed with a soft cloth and a coating of wax year upon year like an item of furniture passed down the generations.
I have an ever-increasing collection of around 50 different Dutch historic tulips, most of them sourced from Hortus Bulborum (the living museum of tulips based in Limmen, just north of Amsterdam) and around two dozen English Florists’ tulips, courtesy of the Wakefield and North of England Tulip Society. These easily identifiable shallow cup-shaped tulips cannot be purchased, and are apportioned to members each autumn after the society’s AGM. Receiving the small parcel through the post is like Christmas coming early.
Historic tulips now form the nexus of my tulips, but I do still fall prey to the delights of the modern annual tulips. Who can resist a Triumph tulip such as the deeply scented burnt umber Cairo, registered in 1999, or Disarrono, a stunning Rembrandt imitator from 2000?
The desert island question. If you could only take three tulip bulbs with you, which ones would they be and why?
Can I choose three historics from my collection and three others? The historics would be the ones I would rescue in a fire, or perhaps more fittingly a flood, but I wouldn’t do without the others either. First the historics:
Tulipa Absalon, dating from 1780, a broken or Rembrandt type. A brownish red of incredible depth streaked with egg-yolk yellow, it falls into the ‘bizarre’ category of tulip colorations (there are three recognised colour categories of Florists’ tulips, Rose, Bybloemen and Bizarre. Bizarres always have a yellow base with brown, orange or bright red petals). It used to be really hard to obtain, but is now quite readily available in the mainstream bulb catalogues, which makes it no less special to me. In fact I love seeing others growing it and deriving the same sort of pleasure from it that I do.
Tulipa Old Times, registered in 1919, a single late breeder of soft raspberry pink edged with primrose yellow – another bizarre colouration in fact. It sounds hideous but the colours seep gently into each other and the overall feel is one of faded old-fashioned grandeur. It has attractive lancet shaped petals, good stem length and impressive staying power in the ground and in a vase. This is a reliable tulip to press, if that is of interest, as it is less fleshy than some of the more modern hybrids which mould easily due to their higher moisture content.
Tulipa James Wild, c.1890, an English florists’ tulip would be my third choice partly because the bulbs I grow have the right qualities for prize-winners - and did indeed win first and second prizes in three classes at the Wakefield and North of England Show when it was last held in 2019. The deep mahogany petals are the pre-requisite half-cup shape and have an extraordinary sheen, comparable in depth of lustre to Dom Pedro, as above. This is also a bizarre, with a yellow base and the faintest of yellow streaks scoring lines up the centres of the petals.
And three of the rest:
Tulipa Ballerina, altogether easier to get hold of and to grow, a tangerine orange lily-flowered tulip (Division 6) with a neat nipped-in waist and a delicious honeyed scent. Like many lily-flowered varieties it will survive year-on-year if left in the ground, so this is one to plant in the border and forget about, unlike the historics above which should be dug up and dried each summer.
Tulipa Mystik van Eijk, new to me this year, a salmon pink Darwin hybrid (Division 4) with typically long stems. It has been the first of my tulips to flower, beating the classic Apeldoorn, and has withstood the freezing temperatures and hailstorms which the last few weeks have thrown at us. I have only grown this one in the flower field thus far but it looks as though it will have good perennial properties – that said I am not mad about having such sizely heads in a perennial planting as they dominate the more elegant lily-flowered and viridiflora varieties. In a vase it needs to be paired with nothing else, it’s colour and form more than hold their own.
Tulipa Black Hero or Black Parrot? It’s difficult to choose between these two almost-blacks. Black parrot is one of the only parrots (Division 10) which I grow, having tired of the heavily distorted heads of most others, which seem to spontaneously snap off because they are so top heavy, not a handy trait for a farmed flower. The smallish, neatish Black Parrot has wavy edged petals of a glamorous purple-black, the narrow leaves a complementary grey-green, and it is an altogether pleasing perennial tulip. Black Hero is equally exotic in a more statuesque way. A really glossy double double it was bred from Queen of Night and is one of the most useful tulips I know, serving as an excellent cut flower, reliable perennial (you will note that I like my tulips to work as perennials) and works with almost any other tulip in a container context. Its only drawback is that it is very sensitive to hail and its burnished black petals become easily pockmarked. If you are not an over-perfectionist like me this should not be a problem.
Are there other plants that you grow alongside the tulips to complement them?
I don’t tend to grow tulips herbaceously in the traditional sense, as annuals arrayed through borders amongst a range of perennial flowers and shrubs, although I do have a grid of four rose beds which are underplanted with T. Black Hero and T. Virichic. Last year we grew hundreds of wallflowers from seed and planted these in and amongst, but we found that the timing was slightly out – the tulips flowered before the wallflowers – and that it was very labour intensive having to pot the wallflowers on, then plant them out, then pull them up. This year we have gone without any bedding plants, and we actually prefer the cleaner, clearer appearance of the beds. No doubt due in part to the fact that Kristy Ramage came for a training day and helped my team construct the most beautiful hazel domes for the roses, which we pruned in to the structures in one continuous (if very slow) coordinated balletic movement.
The only other tulips we use herbaceously are species or botanical tulips. Hannah, my head gardener, introduced me to species tulips about five years ago, and we have been experimenting with them ever since. We grow T. Sylvestris in woodland beds down by the river, alongside the native Narcissus pseudonarcissus and N. Tenby. These are beds of jewelled treasures, and the bright yellow of this elegant woodland tulip complements the blues of Hepatica, Omphaloides and Scilla particularly well.
Another species tulip is T. Whitalliii, named after the plant hunter Edward Whittall. This bronze species variety thrives at the front of our pool border, and basks in the heat reflected from the exceedingly tall mellowed brick wall which runs the length of that part of the garden. It makes its appearance at the beginning of April each year amongst the fresh foliage of thalictrum, fennel, and intersectional peonies and opens up its neat petals to the sun.
Within a container context we play with different complementary plants each year. Last year it was cardoons, inspired by Arthur Parkinson. We planted them at the same time as the tulips, enjoyed the foil of their grey toothed leaves throughout the tulip life cycle, and then removed them with the spent bulbs. At that point we either potted them up to be stored in our backstage holding bay, or replanted them in the same containers with our summer schemes. The year before that we went big on wall flowers, and we have had forget-me-not-phases. I never tire of forget-me-nots.
Could you share a bit about what growing conditions suit tulips the best? Do you have any tips for growing the best blooms? People always seem to mention grit and planting them deeper than you think….
We use sand for all of our historic tulips, a 5cm bed of horticultural sand raked across the beds. The bulbs are placed on them, pointy side up, then the beds are backfilled with topsoil. The sand serves three purposes: it prevents the bulb from rotting or moulding in the soil, it provides a layer of drainage, and it improves the soil year on year when it is dug in.
We used to treat our annual crop in the same way, but decided that it was a waste of time and money as the bulbs are inexpensive to buy, and only expected to last for one year. They are not an investment in time and money in the same way that the historics are.
Likewise, the historic trenches are dug deeper than the annual trenches, harder work at both ends of the season but for a greater return. Planting the bulbs at too shallow a depth can lead to shorter stems, or even flowers seeming to bloom straight from the ground. The annuals are ideally planted at a depth deep enough not to stunt growth, but shallow enough to allow the whole flower, bulb and all, to be pulled out at harvesting time. It’s tricky to get it just right, and we don’t always achieve the end goal.
Do you use your tulips as an annual plant and replace the bulbs every year? Some of mine seem to come back for many years and some don’t and I am never sure why. Are there ways that you can encourage them to be perennial?
The tulips I refer to as annuals are just that, and we pull them out every year. We dry the bulbs we really love, to be planted again later in the year, we compost the ones we really don’t feel much love for, and we replant the ones we quite like around the firepit and compost bays.
Some tulips do come back effectively year on year, and we call these perennial tulips. I keep an ever-expanding list of perennials, any find that many of them are Viridiflora (which have an element of green in them) or lily-flowered. If you are going to plant tulips as perennials then I recommend supplementing them by 20% to 30% each year.
The historic collection are all painstakingly dug up, as detailed above, and painstakingly planted again at the beginning of winter.
I am a great believer in the more intricate varieties being enjoyed close up and I am counting the days until I can put a jug of Absalon on my kitchen table. What tips do you have for what stage to cut them and what I can do to condition them to make the most of their beauty?
I like to leave my tulips in the ground for as long as possible, cutting or pulling them at the point when the flower head is completely coloured and actually starting to open. A flower which lives a full life in fresh air, with rain to water it and wind to blow away any pests and diseases, is going to have a much longer life in the vase. Selling tulips this ripe originally proved to be a problem for some of my customers, who thought their ‘shelf life’ was going to be limited. We have become used to seeing tulips tightly in bud in flower shops and supermarkets, and this has led to a misconception that they have to be purchased at this stage – however they are only for sale like this because the commercial flower industry is unable to freight them cheaply and easily once opened. The tight buds are so they can be packed together in bulk and flown or shipped across long distances with the minimum of damage incurring.
Once cut, plunge the tulips into cold, deep water preferably overnight before arranging them. Some people wrap tulips tightly in paper while conditioning them, so that their stems are encouraged to stay straight, but personally I love the fact that they weave and wind in a vase, as they carry on growing for days.
As to arranging, I love a massed vase full of tulips, but find a single stem on a mantle or bedside completely mesmerising. Just remember to top up the water regularly, as tulips are thirsty flowers. I should recommend changing the water daily, but who on earth has the time or inclination to do that? Spend the time instead staring at the tulips, enjoying them while they last, breathing deeply from their cupped heads – because tulips grown outside, naturally, seasonally and organically nearly all have a scent, however subtle it may be.
A huge thank you to Polly for this wonderful interview. I have so many more questions, particularly about her decision to go organic and how this has benefitted the garden and the growing, but they will have to wait for another day. Keep an eye on NGS for open days and any of her workshops. The garden (and the house) is jaw-droppingly beautiful and I can highly recommend.