The Plant Lover's Guide to Tulips

Informationen zum Autor

Richard Wilford is the collections manager for the Hardy Display section at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He has a particular interest in bulbs and is a member of the Royal Horticultural Society's Bulb Committee. He writes extensively for Kew Magazine and Garden Illustrated among other publications.

Klappentext
An expert guide to the versatile spring flower, the tulip. With recommendations for a selection of both classic and new cultivars, and an extensive plant list of 100 varieties. Features vibrant photography of both tulips and gardens featuring them.

Zusammenfassung
Tulips are the main attraction of the spring garden. They are equally at home in the mixed border, naturalised in grass or displayed in formal containers. These versatile bulbs are a must for spring and early summer colour.

“This detailed book delivers an impressive amount of useful advice on choosing and growing one of the most beguiling of all flowers. Richard Wilford writes with succinct authority, distilling for us all the information that is really useful for gardeners to know.” —Gardens Illustrated

“There are profiles of 100 commonly available species and cultivars, plus growing information, recommendations for companion plants, and tips on how to use tulips in the landscape.” —The English Garden
 
“Positively groans with sumptuous photographs...this book as it helps to demystify those classifications which you see in bulb catalogues and on websites and provides planting of inspiration on how to use these jewel like flowers in your garden.” —Patient Gardener

Auteur
Richard Wilford is the collections manager for the Hardy Display section at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. He has a particular interest in bulbs and is a member of the Royal Horticultural Society’s Bulb Committee (formally the Daffodil and Tulip Committee). He writes for Kew Magazine and Garden Illustrated among others, and serves on the Publications Committee for Kew Publishing and the editorial committees of Kew Magazine and Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. This is his fourth book, all of them illustrated extensively with his photos. 

Texte du rabat
Tulips steal the show in spring when their bright, finely cut flowers light up the garden. Their incredible color range includes almost every imaginable hue from pure white through pastels, rich reds and purples to near black. Their shapes are equally varied and may be short-stemmed, lily-flowered, or even goblet-shaped. Expert Richard Wilford recommends tulips for specific conditions and cultivation preferences, and offers a selection of the brightest, the boldest, and the best.

The Plant Lover’s Guide books offer a rich source of information on both new and classic garden plants. Written by enthusiastic experts, they recommend the best varieties for different situations, inspire ideas for new plant combinations, and are packed with resources for the home gardener. These gorgeous guides celebrate the beauty of each plant and form a comprehensive library that every plant lover will want to own.

Résumé
Tulips are one of the most popular spring-flowering bulbs. Available in a huge range of colors and in a wide array of shapes, they’re a mainstay of most spring gardens. They are the focus of festivals worldwide and are a sure sign spring is on the way. The Plant Lover’s Guide to Tulips, by Richard Wilford of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, profiles 100 commonly available species and cultivars, and features growing information, recommendations for companion plants, and tips on how to use tulips in the landscape. More than 250 color photographs bring these colorful gems to life.

Échantillon de lecture
Introduction: Why I Love Tulips
How can you not love a perfect display of bright, pristine tulips, basking in the warmth of the spring sunshine? The richness of their colours and the variety of their flower shapes make tulips endlessly fascinating. It may not be love at first sight, but the allure of these plants will creep up on you and before you know it, you are seeking out new varieties, experimenting with different colour combinations, and finding new places to try tulips in your garden.
    
I first started paying attention to tulips when I was looking after the bulb collections at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. One of the cold frames was home to a collection of tulip species growing in clay pots. I watered them, repotted them every autumn, and put them out on display when they flowered, as I did with all the other bulbs. Not until I saw a tulip growing in the wild, however, did I really start to take more notice.
    
It was on the Mediterranean island of Crete that I saw my first wild tulip. It was tiny---a delicate, pale pink flower, almost white, held on a short stem above two narrow leaves. Its name was Tulipa cretica and it seemed to be growing straight out of a rock, surviving on the bare minimum of soil. The Cretan summer is long, hot, and dry, yet this little plant was going to live through it until the autumn rains arrived. It could do this because it grows from a bulb, and before the summer hit, it would retreat back to that bulb, hidden from the sun and needing no water.
    
What seemed so remarkable to me was how this miniscule flower was related to the showy bedding tulips I was used to seeing in parks and gardens. I saw other tulips on Crete that were larger and more brightly coloured, such as the pink-and-yellow Tulipa saxatilis, growing on the cliffs of a gorge or scattered through high-altitude meadows, but still they seemed remote from the garden tulips back home, which I found intriguing. I was beginning to fall for them.

Another turning point was a visit to Keukenhof in the Netherlands a few years later. This garden is devoted to bulbs, and in mid to late spring, it is the tulips that steal the show, and they really do put on a show. It is almost too much. There must be thousands and thousands of tulips all flowering at once. As you turn each corner, another stunning display confronts you. My experience at Keukenhof was the complete opposite of my encounter with the tiny tulip on Crete. Up to that point, I had been dismissive of tulips in bedding, but now I was well and truly hooked. This is how tulips should be grown and are grown in many gardens worldwide. 

Bulbs are the perfect way for a plant to survive a long, dry summer, and they are easily transported when they are dormant, which is how tulips have found their way all over the world. Festivals, like those held in the Skagit Valley (United States) and Ottawa (Canada), celebrate the tulip with massed displays. The parks of Istanbul, where the craze for tulips has been reignited in recent years, are filled with millions of tulips every spring. In the United Kingdom, gardens devote space to tulips for their own festivals, bringing in visitors who marvel at the spectacle. Tulip festivals can be found across the globe from North America to South Korea, Japan, and Australia. Everyone, it seems, loves a tulip.
    
This love of tulips isn’t new. The plants have been cultivated in Europe for well over 400 years, and before that they were celebrated in Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), in the days of the Ottoman Empire. It was the Dutch who perfected the cultivation and commercialization of the tulip once it had arrived from Turkey. They hybridized and selected tulips, producing new varieties by adding new species found in Central Asia into the mix. Carpets of bulbs now cover the flat fields of the Netherlands in spring, and the vast majority of tulips for sale today come from there.

Bedding isn’t the …