Tulip-tide

Steffie Shields celebrates Easter with a rainbow sea of spring colour!

Dormant bulbs underground by the million are readying for their big reveal. Our greatest fifty-day feast, Eastertide, will see a wave of festive flowers sweeping the length and breadth of Lincolnshire.

Golden yellow daffodils, often called Lenten lilies, and pure white, trumpet-shaped Madonna lilies, Lilium candidum, will soon imbue every church and chapel with joyful freshness and fragrance in traditional celebration.

Apparently, tulip festivals are the latest rage. Since 2021, post-Covid, Hampton Court Palace has provided the annual setting for over 100,000 tulip bulbs displayed in both historic and contemporary planting across 60 acres of formal grand borders and parterres.

How appropriate for palace gardens once the late 17th-century ‘playground’ of William of Holland and his wife Mary, after inheriting the throne!

In 2024 delegates at the World Tulip Summit formally recognised Hampton Court Palace as ‘Britain’s Largest and Greatest Tulip Heritage Garden’. Has this tremendous accolade set off a right-royal craze?
That November, a ‘Pontefract power couple’, Heather and Rob Copley, planted 517,000 individual tulip bulbs, sourced directly from Holland, over eight acres in West Yorkshire – their first Tulip Festival complete with windmill, Ferris wheel, bratwurst stand and ‘pick your own tulips for £1’.

Opening again from early April, 600,000 more bulbs have been added to that original planting. Farmer Copley’s Tulip Festival 2026 should prove even more spectacular.

Spilmans Tulip Festival, another brand new event, takes place at Church Farm, Thirsk in North Yorkshire.
A range of tulip varieties, early to mid-season and late-season bloomers, should ensure a constant flow of tulips coming into flower throughout the season. Visitors will be able “to wander through, pick from and get lost in” a quarter of a million bulbs across three acres, a “sea of colour”.

Tulleys Tulip Fields have two sites, one near St Albans in Hertfordshire and the other northwest of Warwick, each with a bespoke windmill. Online photos show mini versions of Keukenhof, the world-famous tulip garden in the Netherlands.

In the south, Arundel Castle, a restored and remodelled medieval castle in West Sussex, will provide a memorable backdrop for waves of 120 rare and named varieties of tulips, 110,000 in total, including the yellow wild tulip, ‘Tulipa sylvestris’.

Spring colour
Festival fervour is contagious. This April a major new event will be launched in Norfolk: Tulips at Houghton Hall, in the award-winning five-acre walled garden.

Leading bulb specialists Peter Nyssen have supplied all the bulbs for a spectacular celebration of spring colour. Species tulips naturalising beneath old fruit trees, bold drifts of later-flowering varieties in borders, along walkways, and in numerous potted displays, should attract thousands of tourists.

Closer to home, taking part in this year’s Vanbrugh 300 festivities, Grimsthorpe Castle’s gardening team have arranged another great tulip display to commemorate the famous dramatist and architect of Flemish descent, Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726).

There may be more. Search online with the words ‘Tulip Festival’ to verify this growing trend and to appreciate how once these richly-coloured, perennial bulbs caused ‘tulip fever’. You will be dazzled by mesmerizing photographs and videos, especially at www.youtube.com.

Origins and history
Tulips are native to Central Asia. Easy to grow, members of the lily family, they were first cultivated by the Ottoman Empire before, in the mid-16th century, their introduction into Europe.

The English herbalist, John Gerard (c.1545-1612) in describing their culinary and medicinal properties in his early book, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597), first recorded the origins of the name, while considering a tulip to be masculine!

‘After it [= the Tulipa of Bolonia] hath beene some fewe daies flowred, the points and brims of the flower turne backward, like a Dalmatian or Turkes cap, called Tulipan, Tolepan, Turban, and Turfan, whereof it tooke his name.’

Shrewd merchants from the Netherlands spread both the bulbs, and their fame, worldwide. Here in Lincolnshire, particularly in the low-lying South Holland district, associations with Netherlanders in fen drainage and in bulb-growing have been strong for centuries.

Since the 1950s, flower parades, daffodil shows and festivals have always proven popular.

Congratulations to Springfields Horticultural Society! 2026 marks their 60th anniversary. Since England last won the World Cup, this charity has managed the marvellous Springfield Festival Gardens in Spalding, flying the flag for tulips with stunning displays year on year. The last time I explored their ‘Tulip Walk’, I noticed a striking green and orange viridiflora cultivar Tulipa ‘Orange Marmalade’ which would please Paddington Bear!

Picture-perfect
Both historic National Trust Gardens, Belton and Gunby, are promising a “cracking” Easter egg hunt. To earn a traditional chocolate reward, puzzles and clues will help young detectives uncover eggs hidden along trails winding through beautiful gardens and parkland. There are sure to be tulips, though I doubt if children will tiptoe through them!

Treat yourself to a clutch of Greigii bulbs ‘Easter Surprise’ as you plan your own tulip festival 2027. As each bud responds to light, its colour will increase, from gorgeous yellow at the bottom, feathering up to red on the edge, before opening its rounded cup to reveal a fiery, scarlet interior.

Just like Max Bygrave’s catchy melody, “When it’s spring again – I’ll bring again – tulips from Amsterdam”, this striking colour combination will always prompt memories of a magical visit to Keukenhof Gardens where, as an impressionable eight-year-old, I ached to take my first photograph, prompted by a single glossy, Kodak-coloured tulip.

Get your phones and cameras ready. Capture a polished sheen that dazzles in sunshine or a subtle blush in shade. Photograph tulips dotted in a pasture like eye-candy Smarties. The tulip is one of the most photogenic flowers, the ‘Twiggy of the natural world’!

Long-lived parrot tulips are doubly surprising. Their exotic feather-like petals flutter with a range of streaks as if painted by Monet.

Savour that immense variety of both petal shape and vivid colour, in every shade except blue, the perfect plant partners for bluebells, forget-me-nots, or camassias. Then remember to enter your best shots in the Lincolnshire Gardens Trust photography competition by the third Friday in October!

I have loved tulips all my life. Little did I think that I would end up putting down roots in a county where tulip-growing has long been embedded in its DNA.

Wishing everyone a Happy Easter, and an amazing treasure trove of triumphant tulips in your own garden and in any ‘festival’ gardens you visit.

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