Tulips

There are a great many wonderful plants and flowers on our earth and my favorite of them all is the Tulip, it may not be the most exotic or exciting of plants but I think it is one of true, simple beauty, one that is a dream to grow and a marvel to display. I've loved Tulips since I was a girl and my mother grew them in our garden, at first they seemed so plain, single flowers, bright in colour but unfussy but as the years passed and different varieties were introduced to our garden I realized how diverse and wonderful they really were, my love for the flowers finally reached it's peak when I ... more

The tulip does not as you may think originate from Holland, but probably from around the Crimea and around the black sea. The tulip is in fact the national flower of turkey and Iran. The tulip was first seen in Turkey by Europeans in1556. Tulips became luxury items. In 1593 a botanist at a Dutch university cultivated the bulb. In the early 1600 bulbs of the tulip were very sought after and expensive the tem tulip mania is used to describe this time which crashed in 1637. The bulb was cultivated and new coloured flowers developed. By 1630 Holland had field and fields of tulips A\pparently ... more

Sorry to say it's that time of year when we will soon be buying and planting our bulbs for our spring show in the garden, or pots if you prefer. Tulips are one of the few bulbs that we associate with spring, even though we may not want to think about that already, soon we will be clearing our gardens to make way for the annual bulb planting. I tend to plant a lot in tubs, so that I can place them near the house and forever see some sort of colour when I look out the window in the dreary first months of the year. Facts Although Tulips are associated with Holland they were in fact originally ... more

As we head into the Spring months it is good to realise that we have the beauty of the spring bulbs to look forward to. Many of the supermarkets and florists have potted bulbs on sale already which are fairly inexpensive. Tulips have to be a favourite with many, there are so many varieties which offer a wonderfully attractive display of colour. Last year I planted some dwarf tulips in pots and although I had a good colourful show I have chosen to revert back to filling my tubs with the normal bulbs which provide stems at around 15 inches high. A few days ago I was walking around Lidl`s ... more

If I asked you to associate a place name with tulips, you’d probably sing in chorus ‘Tulips from Amsterdam’. Nowadays this association is justified, the tulips have indeed become a symbol for the Netherlands. In Keukenhof, the largest bulb flower park in the world (32 hectares), which was founded in 1949, 4.5 million tulips in 100 varieties bloom every year. Yet, the tulip is not an endemic plant of the Netherlands. The uncultivated form grows in vast parts of Africa, Asia and Europe. It was during the Ottoman Empire that tulips were cultivated for commercial reasons for the first time. The ... more