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In 2016 I was given some seedlings of Tulipa sprengeri. After a couple of years in pots they were planted out in the spring of 2019.
In the meantime I bought a bulb which has flowered among the snowdrops. I am hoping to get it established under the trees at the top
of the garden. In 1986 Chris Brickell wrote about Van Tubergens collection of wild tulips in 'The Vanishing Garden': "These included T. sprengeri, described in 1894. It is a distinctive species both botanicaly and because of its very late flowering in May. To Bowles, it was 'always rather sad to see the first one open, for it means the close of the Tulip season'. It is a bout 10 to 12 inches high, with erect, shiny green leaves and a starry flower composed of well-spaced narrow segments, pointed and curling at the edges, intense tomato-red on the inner surfaces and buff-tinted on the back of the outer segments. Long-lived, free-flowering, adaptable, tolerant of shade, increasing rapidly from self-sown seed and blooming in three to four years, it is 'an excellent garden tulip', in Hall's view. It won an A M in 1948. T. sprengeri is offered fairly regularly in commerce, but for some reasons it remains very expensive and is unfamiliar to most gardeners. It deserves to be much more extensively grown, not ony for its own charms, but to ensure its place in cultivation since it has not been sighted recently in the wild." |
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| 1st May 2016 | ||
