Gardening
Scarlet in spring
Denis Wood.
Fortunately for those of us who have been hard at it planting daffodils and crocuses and cyclamen, and all the other small bulbs, tulips do not have to go in until November. I would like to make a small anthology of scarlet tulips to quicken the gentle spring colours of crocuses, aconites and daffodils.
Many of us, looking at tulip growers' catalogues and having noted down one or two of the early single and .early double tulips, get stuck in the Darwins, whereas only a few pages further on all the wealth of species or near-species are spread, as it were, at our feet. Some of the first of these to come into flower are the Kaufmannianas, known also as the waterlily tulips. Most of them are pink or creamy white, sometimes with red markings, but among them is one of the earliest of all the red tulips, Scarlet Elegance, which at least fives up to the colour in its name and is only about 6 inches high. Soon after, T. prestans comes into flower; a little taller, far from upright, often relatively lax in growth because it has four or more of its bright crimson flowers on each stem. Another early one is Little Red Riding Hood, one of the Greigii hybrids, notable for the purplish-brown mottlings with broken or brown stripes in the foliage, rather like the mottlings on some wild birds' eggs. None of
these is for ceremonial bedding, and I try to naturalise them by planting them 6 inches deep.
About the middle of April. T. fosteriana and its hybrids come 'into flower. These are about 16 inches high, considerably taller than the previous ones, and with very much larger flowers as much as 10 inches across. One of these, T. fosteriana Red Emperor, alias, curiously, Madame Lefeber, is a sheer, unabashed, outrageous display of ostentation, unforgettable when the flowers in full sunshine open flat in abandoned oriental ecstasy. The very large flowers on not particularly robust stems, render it vulnerable to rough winds and it will last longer in sheltered positions. There is a rather shorter, solider version, T. fosteriana princeps, which is a good one to use in tubs.
Lily-flowered tulips appeared about 1914, the results of crosses between T. retroflexa and one of the cottage tulips. They occur now in almost all colours. A good red one is Aladdin, scarlet with a yellow band along the edges of the petals. These lily-flowered tulips live up to their name, having an elegant, waisted shape. This, combined with their flexible, willowy stems, makes them unsuitable for formal bedding. They are perhaps best seen against a background of a yew hedge or in a bed in front of the wall of a houses, grouped in fives or sevens.
The shrill, improbable parrot tulips come into flower later. Red Parrot is about 28 inches high and will be in flower well into May. It ha's deeply-cut laciniate petals, bright crimson rather than scarlet; a good votive tribute in a silver vase in front of a Picasso print.
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