Jane Powers finds the tulip has more personalities than any other bulb: mad, sad, pretty, plain, flamboyant, elegant, neat and disorderly - to mention a few
Not so long ago the tulip was best known for its ability to be a garden soldier. The neatly-dressed and stolid Darwin Hybrids - amongst them red 'Apeldoorn' and its yellow counterpart 'Golden Apeldoorn' - were enlisted to march en masse through park bedding schemes. Or, in smaller numbers, to stand stiffly to attention in front gardens - although not in those where the gardener considered himself to be a person of taste.
Gardeners with ideas of sophistication largely confined themselves to the smaller "species" or "botanical" tulips (varieties that are the same, or very similar to the wild kinds). Select gatherings of taller tulips were acceptable, but only of muted characters such as the near-black 'Queen of Night' or the ivory-flowered 'Purissima' and 'White Triumphator'. I can state this with authority - because I was such a gardener.
And, oh, what we were missing for all those years - with our uniformly uniformed, ramrod-straight troops, or our darling little gems, or our terribly refined monochrome characters. For the tulip has more manifestations and personalities than any other bulb: mad, sad, pretty, plain, flamboyant, elegant, neat, disorderly - to mention a few. It was Anna Pavord's extensively-researched book, The Tulip, on the singular bulb's place in history and horticulture, that reopened our eyes to its desirability in its many, many forms.
And now, a new book, Gardening with Tulips, by Michael King, explores its possibilities in the garden. A section where tulips are grouped by flower colour and coded by season, will be especially useful to designers.
The tulip year starts quietly enough in March, with the smaller species and the short botanicals. Among the former are the delicate, green-flushed, creamy Tulipa biflora with its egg-yolk centre, and the similar (but whiter) T. polychroma. T. humilis, as its name suggests, is a low-growing thing, rarely taller than 15cm, and unusually for a tulip, it is scented.
You need to hover your nose right over its tiny goblets to smell it - so grow it in a raised bed or a pot, for easy access. There are nine different cultivars, most in the pink portion of the floral spectrum. T. praestans 'Fusilier', another early -species tulip, is also aptly named, with its redcoat flowers.
The botanicals include the low-growing Kaufmanniana group (or waterlily tulips, so called because of their flared petals), the Greigii group and the Fosterianas. Many tulips in the first two of these groups are suitable for "perennialising", that is, they will flower year after year, provided the bulbs get a good baking in summer.
One of my favourites is 'Toronto', a Greigii that is in full flight in this garden at the end of March. It is a high-value tulip, with three or more flowers per bulb, of a deep salmon pink that perfectly complements the garnet-flushed, new foliage of paeonies, and the coral stems of dogwoods.
The middle of the tulip season comes in April (or later if you are in the chilly midlands or up a hill) and is crowded with hundreds of varieties. An immense army of Darwin Hybrids turns the country's parks into floral parade grounds. They should not be sneezed at though, because - as Michael King points out in Gardening with Tulips - they are staunch perennialisers in the domestic garden (plant them deeply).
The flowers are smaller in subsequent years - not always a virtue, but definitely so in this case, as a first-year Darwin Hybrid can pack far too much punch, with its fist-sized flowers. The most interesting is the scented 'Daydream', with flowers that open yellow, but gradually change to a glowing orange and toffee concoction.
Flowering a little later, the Triumph tulips are less lanky and more sturdy. A real good-looker is the classic 'Prinses Irene' (introduced in 1949), whose rich orange petals are painted with maroon brush strokes. 'Zurel', another hand-painted Triumph, has purple markings on a white base. One of the oldest is the gorgeous 160-year-old 'Couleur Cardinal', with violet-flushed dark red blooms.The prima donnas of the tulip world arrive late in the season - as befits their self-important, show-off status.
The Lily-flowered group have elongated blooms, with petals pointing gracefully to the heavens. Among them are 'White Triumphator', the yellow-and-red 'Mona Lisa' and the handsome 'Burgundy'.
The Viridifloras have a green-suffused backbone along each petal, and include the cream-and-lime 'Spring Green', a most restorative-looking tulip - and a complement to the fresh greens of early herbaceous foliage.
The Fringed group is just that, with ragged edges to the petals. 'Swan Wings' is purest white, while 'Canasta' has white-edged red flowers, and with such an over-the-top get-up needs to be placed carefully in the garden - perhaps in a container.
There are other tulip groups, but I don't have room to mention them here, because I want the last word to go to the outrageous Parrots. In bud, the flowers resemble the bad-tempered bills of the tropical bird (which gives them their name), but when they open up, their petals are fringed and curled and crinkled, and often rippled with two or three colours.
'Flaming Parrot' is yellow and red, while 'Green Wave' is pink, green and white. And then there is the flamboyant 'Estella Rijnveld', a magnificent raspberry-ripple confection of crimson and white, named 60 years ago, after the breeder's wife. She must have been some tulip. jpowers@irish-times.ie
Gardening with Tulips by Michael King (Frances Lincoln, £25). The Tulip by Anna Pavord (Bloomsbury, hardback: £30; paperback: £19.99).