Tulip; Single, Lonely, NSOH
There used to be a television programme called The House Detectives in which chuckly old cove Dan Cruickshank would pad around some very old, much-altered house banging his head on low beams , looking for its Tudor or Georgian roots...
Dan would clonk around the timbers and try and assess in which period they were inserted in the structure. Unless it’s still broadcast on some distant galaxy of a Freeview channel * then it must have been too high-brow to have been recommissioned.
Well, I’ve got something equally stimulating that can replace it, The Garden Detectives. In this programme professional gardeners wander round my garden and ask the question – Why was that planted there, but in particular, why so many single tulips?
It’s a question I can’t answer, we inherited them.
Before we got here the house was owned by a nonagenarian lady who had a ‘gardener’ come in once a week. So far as we could tell, this person would prune the roses, cut the grass and then start yet another compost heap. There were at least seven separate piles when we bought the place. I say ‘grass’, it’s a springy moss/grass combination of about 50/50.
We moved in in December and the following Spring noticed odd tulip bulbs making their appearance round the garden. Now I don’t profess to be Chris Ireland-Jones from Avon Bulbs, but even I know that a solo tulip is not the way to go. So how did we reach that situation? Like a good whodunnit, there are so many theories for a garden detective.
a) They started off in a clump and that one is the sole survivor – the last bulb standing b) They were planted there accidentally, having been transferred there in soil dug up from another place c) There was a short-lived craze in the 1960s for planting single tulip bulbs d) By some freak of nature they have self-seeded e) The squirrel’s been batting well above his average
Each year since then I’ve promised that I will take a photo of the tulip while it’s in bloom, then when it’s had time to replenish the bulb, dig it up and amalgamate it with a colour-appropriate grouping. There are many such happy clumps already established in the garden thanks to Squires at Long Ditton overstocking on their bulbs one year and selling them off at £1 a pack. I didn’t hold back.
And each year after these tulip outliers have gone and bloomed and after the wind has shaken the petals loose, I have failed to photograph them or do anything about their inglorious isolation. But this year is different, as you can see, the imagery is taken.
But why did they ever get there in the first place…?
*’Dave’ is the channel with a great repository of comedy programmes, what about have a channel made up exclusively of gradening programmes – call it ‘Geoff’, or ‘Percy’.
