Tulips are a true spring showstopper. These classic flowers have been loved by many for hundreds of years and come in almost every colour as well simple and showy varieties. Plus, they’re easy to grow in containers, flower beds and even lawns for a pop of colour as the season unfolds.
In this video you’ll learn how to grow the best spring tulip displays for your pots, garden borders and cut flowers for your home with handy tips from Piers Horry, Head Gardener at the National Trust’s Dyrham Park in Gloucestershire.
Join Piers at Dyrham Park’s seventeenth-century baroque-style garden near Bath – home to a fifteen thousand-strong tulip spectacle come spring. As Piers guides you through the different planting styles and eye-catching displays on offer, you’ll find formal planting in the Parterre – where you’ll be introduced to the elegant new cultivar of tulip named after Dyrham Park, created in collaboration with Blue Diamond Garden Centres – to more informal drift-style planting in the orchard. Both styles of planting can be recreated in your own garden if you follow Piers’ top tips for a successful display, including planting your tulip bulbs at the right depth, ensuring ample drainage and deadheading and cutting back foliage so your tulips can flourish in your spring garden year after year.
Watch the video to learn how, with a little forward-planning and by following Piers’ advice on how best to plant your bulbs, you can achieve a spring display of tulips packed with colour too.
We’ve many types of tulip on display at the gardens and parks in our care, so if you haven’t got tulips growing at home, you can spot them in spring at gardens and parks near you: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/gardens-parks
Our gardening teams also have plenty of top tips for making the most of your own green space throughout the year. You can find seasonal gardening tips on our website: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/discover/gardening-tips
If you’d like to plant your own tulips, we’ve worked exclusively with Blue Diamond to create a collection of different tulip bulbs inspired by the places we look after. You’ll be able to shop the collection at Blue Diamond garden centres from September 2024: https://www.bluediamond.gg/national-trust
(Piers Horry) Welcome to Dyrham Park. 17th century Baroque style Dutch garden. A garden that was created to show the allegiance to the Dutch King. And what can be more Dutch than 15,000 tulips. Today we’re going to have a look around the gardens, look at the different designs, and a bit about cultivar selection of tulips and how they fit the area. So here we are in our tour de force, the formal West Terrace parterre. And what we really want here is some extra elegance. And that’s what the Dyrham Park tulip brings to us. Working with Blue Diamond garden centres, they’ve created this fantastic new cultivar Dyrham Park, which is a very formal and elegant tulip that really matches the Baroque and formality of the garden. If you’re going to put them in pots don’t be afraid to put them in really high density. You can get away with quite a lot in a pot. But do be sure that you’re getting the right level of drainage in your pots. Now we’re quite generous that we put a lot of soil in. Your bulb should be about two and a half times the depth of the bulb into the soil, and then the rest of it should be drainage. So keep all that crushed terracotta, broken bits of stone, to allow that free flow of water. We also raise our pots up slightly so that the water can move out and it doesn’t sit in a puddle. We lift the bulbs out of the Avenue and then we take this informal setting where we can spread them out a bit more and just then add them into our spring, our summer bulb display. So we get this continuous flowering display inside our orchard. So we want to get the best out of our tulip display year on year. So as they start finishing, such as this one, we can think about deadheading because we don’t want all that energy being put into the seed. We want all that energy going back into the bulb. So we’ll be cutting off this stalk soon and we’ll be leaving the leaves. And then as the leaves start to die back all that energy and nutrient is going back into the tulip bulb. And then we’ll be cutting those off as well, and then they’ll be ready for a future year. So you can buy plants, bulbs, or seeds from your local National Trust shop or local garden centre so you can create your own displays. Even if you’re not intending to do anything in your own garden, come and visit one of our gardens and we’ll do the display for you.
2 Comments
❤❤❤
Great work. Keep it up guys. Thank you!