Dunsborough Park English Garden

A taste for tulips English garden

Dunsborough Park, Ripley, Surrey

The annual tulip festival laid out in the formal English gardens of Baroness Sweerts de Landas inspires Steven Desmond to consider what makes a truly superb English garden spring display

TULIP HISTORY

THE TULIP HISTORY GOES WAY BACK WHEN the heroically named Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire to the court of Suleyman the Magnificent, was travelling through Turkey on a fact-finding study tour in 1554, he noticed an unfamiliar garden flower. He made enquiries, and recorded his impression that this flower was called tulipam. Something must have got lost in translation, as the Turkish word for the flower was lale, and Busbecq had noted the word for a turban, but the name has stuck. The tulip history go on... In 1594, the Emperor's gardener, Charles de l'Ecluse, moved to the university botanic garden at Leiden in the Netherlands and brought his collection of tulips with him from Vienna. He can have had no idea of what he had started, but tulip history starts from those times.

The enterprising Dutch have been cultivating and exporting this major component of their national economy ever since. The tulip is as unwaveringly popular as I can ever recall, and is perhaps more commonly seen now as a cut flower than in past years. The mental image of its clean lines and
bright colors is a measure of the return of spring after the gloom of late winter, and the mere fact that it does best in this country if bought and planted fresh each year keeps it regularly at the front of our minds.

In English gardens flowers for cutting are best grown for the purpose in rows in the kitchen garden, but for garden display, we should exploit the tulip's obvious potential for formal planting schemes, with or without accompaniment. I like to see in the English spring garden a pattern of the pink Double Early tulip Peach Blossom rising above an uneven carpet of forget-me-nots in April, or the slender glory of the yellow lily-flowered form West Point projecting, tall and elegantly waisted, from the Persian Carpet mixture of wallflowers in May in this English garden. Half the point of spring English garden bedding is, after all, the fact that you can have a different scheme in place every year.

English Garden at Dunsborough Park

A select few insist, in the teeth of much skepticism  that tulips can he naturalized in grass in the same way as daffodils, and thus left to come up each year in meadow style. I have seen it done in a few places, and can confirm that it does work, and is always the subject of favorable comment on English gardens at Dunsborough Park.

It makes sense that the most suitable tulips in the English gardens at Dunsborough Park are the species and more vigorous hybrids. With choice comes homework, and here we enter the minefield of tulip nomenclature, which soon ramifies in the mind into a dense interlocking pattern of form,
color, height and season of flowering. The more you know about English gardens at Dunsborough Park, the better it gets, but until you have some degree of mastery it will pay to remember the old motto: if all else fails, read the instructions.

Better still, go out and view the plants in flower at English gardens in Dunsborough Park. The season lasts from March to the end of May, and there are plenty of places where elaborate displays are laid on, complete with English garden labels, so that you can mount your very own fact-finding study tour, with final decisions whittled down over the tea and cakes. If you're appalled at my choices (each to his own), there is no end of variety in the English gardens at Dunsborough Park, from the conventionally shapely Darwin Hybrids to such fluffy exotics as the fringed tulips
and the endless visual fascination provoked by the bizarre combinations of form and color in the parrot division.

There are now tulip festivals in many English gardens in different parts of the England, although few can rival the intensity of the one that takes over the walled gardens of Dunsborough Park in Surrey during late April, organised by the owner, the enterprising Dutch Baroness Caroline Sweerts
de Landas. Some traditions of English garden have plenty of  life in them yet.



PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARIANNE MAJERUS 

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