I *may* have mentioned my somewhat sniffy attitude to tulips before (*definitely have*…) but that does not mean that I am going to dismiss them out of hand. There are always exceptions to the rule and I came across one on our visit to the city cemetery, Te Henui, last week.

Look at these graves of mass, mixed tulips. It is like a wildflower meadow, albeit tulip hybrids are about as far away from wildflowers as can be imagined. As of last week, this pretty sight has escaped the fate of last year’s tulips when some atrocious grave robbers regarded the display as their personal picking garden. I loved this vibrant sight on a grey day.

Mark and I discussed these many different tulips. I quite like the little, pointed purple ones and the huge, overblown lemon affairs were reminiscent of herbaceous peonies. We agreed that it was the red and yellow bicolors that we most disliked and I wasn’t at all keen on the orange ones.

We only grow two varieties here and both are species, originally collected from the wild (but not by us). Tulipa saxatilis from Crete I praise every year. It gently increases for us and has a softness that the stiff hybrids lack. Our little yellow one is probably Tulipa sylvestris, the wild or woodland species, native throughout Eurasia and North Africa. I was amused to find a photo of it from the mid 1950s in our rockery here. We have kept it alive but I rather doubt that we have any more of it than Mark’s parents started with 70 years ago.

Tulips have a long history and still retain popularity that shows up every year in shared photographs on line, particularly from the UK and northern Europe. Of course, I could pick out more desirable selections but it is the waste that also worries me. Even in those northern climes, they are often treated as annuals. They can limp on in our climate for a while, getting ever weaker with a dramatic decline in blooming after the first year. When growing bulbs, I want to buy once and then grow them well enough that they will return for many years to come.

I have never been to see the tulips at Keukenhof near Amsterdam and it is not on my bucket list. But I then remembered Floriade in Canberra in 2017 which was an astonishing spring display. I wrote about it then but I also take this opportunity to pull out some of my photos.

Tulips will forever be known as chillips in our house. That is due to a regular presenter on a very popular TV garden show from back when we still actually had one. This particular presenter was somewhat of a fan of chillips, as he pronounced it each spring season. Let there be chillips but in meadows and mixed plantings, I say.