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Every Spring, horticulturist and author sarah raven Enjoys the fruits of her labor as her container tulips add color to her garden at Perch Hill Farm, East SussexWhere visitors can view a spectacular combination of bulbs during open days from mid-April.
He has now collaborated with renowned creators and designers including Kim Murray and Gardners. World Presenter Arit Andersson is to release a new edition of ‘The Collective’, featuring his own autumn planting tulip options to celebrate the colors he is passionate about.
Whether it’s soft pastels or vibrant orange, velvety red, purple and pink, there’s a tulip combination that will brighten your containers, says Raven, author of A Year Full of Pots, who runs courses and workshops in Perch Hill and beyond.
Here, she suggests three of her favorite combinations.
1. Pretty pastels
“If you want a pastel palette, maybe you want them all to bloom at the same time. We have the ‘Shells on the Beach’ collection, which includes soft colors like ‘San’, the most amazing pink to apricot, ‘Silver Cloud’, which is a wonderful pink, and ‘Mango Charm’, again an apricot color.
These come later so if you want something that comes earlier, try a variety called ‘Mystique van Eijk’, then with that collection you will get a range of colors that really work.
2. Pure white
“If you have a shady spot you can go for almost pure white. I would choose ‘White Valley’, which is one of my favourites, mixed with ‘Purissima’ which is really early and will give you a succession, maybe planting something like the later flowering ‘White Triumphator’.”
3. Courageous and talented
“For an incredibly beautiful, bold and brilliant collection of colors, along with orange, pink and red, a great combination is ‘Marriette’, ‘Sarah Raven’ and ‘Ballerina’, the most beautifully scented orange.”
She also recommends ‘Unique de France’, a red variety with glossy leaves that looks great in a pot.
Should you mix your plants?
Some people like to keep just tulips in their pots to show off their true glory, while others mix them with other plants.
“We plant the tulips with something to keep gray squirrels from eating the bulbs below. So we plant either edible crops like flat-leaf parsley or hardy salad leaves like rocket or mizuna.
“You can plant wallflowers or pansies. In our tests here we found that by planting more, gray squirrels do not smell or pay attention to the bulbs below.
“The other thing that works really well is Iris reticulata, little iris, which flower in February, so they bloom before the tulips, but if we’re going to do that we put our rose prunings in a knots and crosses grid over the top of the pot to protect them from gray squirrels.
“If you don’t have roses in your garden, pick some holly or brambles and use them instead.”
Raven also plants lots of first-flowering snowdrops and crocuses in her pots which will emerge long before the tulips and will liven up the garden in February, when low light levels can bring the gloom of winter.
“As soon as snow drops fall, I take them out of the pot along with the leaves and plant them in the garden.
“With the irises, when they are all ready I pull them out with the tulips and store them in onion bags in a barn until the next autumn.”
Planting Tips
She suggests that unlike some spring bulbs, tulips produce better fruit when planted later in the year.
“Compared to alliums, hyacinths and narcissi, tulips begin to establish their roots very late. They do not begin to bulb under growth pressure until later than all other species. The physiology of the plant means that you can plant it last.
“The other reason is that historically when we had frosts, which we don’t have that much because of climate change, it was always thought that it was good to get a few hard frosts, which would then kill the tulip blight spores sitting on the surface of the soil.
“It’s not so relevant anymore because here we don’t get frost before January sussexWith our wet, mild autumn, winter and spring as of 2023 and 2024, tulip blight is becoming less of a problem due to the lack of frost.
container advice
Raven recommends that when planting tulips in containers, plant the bulbs closer together than in the border.
“In a border you space them one and a half times the diameter of the bulb. In a pot, I would space one times the diameter.”
She advises not to worry about watering as there will be rain in the winter and they are not going to spur growth immediately.
Be careful about pot hygiene, she says. If you know you had pot blight last season, wash the pot with disinfectant to kill the spores.