Usually people come to my garden and are amazed by the lack of flowers - it is difficult to explain that if the flowers are still in the beds something is wrong as they haven't sold . . .
These voluptuous grande dames have lived out their lives in the cutting garden as they have dodgy stems - the outer coating has a flaw and they can't be picked without their heads falling off.
They seem to stay intact in the garden though - and there they are one of my favourite flowers - Orange favourite indeed - late flowering, long lasting, sweetly scented.
I'll be sad when the petals fall.
My mother was around our garden a lot last week as she was house-sitting and said that some of our tulips have gone a jazzy yellow-and-red stripy colour, which is down to some sort of virus/disease in the bulb. Have you heard this? Carol Klein was apparently talking about it. I'm starting to wonder whether that's the reason for the meant-to-be-peach enormous Darwin's coming out slightly orangy but mostly yellow... Hmmm. At least the Queen of the Nights have been coming out well, have lasted 3 weeks, and are still looking fab.
Posted by: Tash | May 28, 2008 at 12:45 PM
The stripy effect is a virus - it is what happened to those historical dutch tulips that people bought for enormous prices. The breaking of the colour was random (it wasn't appreciated that it was a virus until much later) so you could gamble on whether your tulip would break.
When I was down at Arne Maynards garden earlier in the month he had planted a bed with historic tulips (at £5 a bulb) they were called lizard. They weren't out fully when I was there but were gorgeous purple and white stripes.
I have 2 tulips that have a virus in my garden and bizarrely they come back year after year where the other ones fail to rebloom.
In my experience peach is a very dodgy colour description and ranges from yellow to american tan in colour.
J
x
Posted by: Jane | May 28, 2008 at 07:34 PM