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Fairy Crown #4 – Spring Bulb Extravaganza

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In my garden, the month of May brings the familiar song of the cardinal high up in my black walnut tree, the flurry of house sparrows making nests in the cedar hedge and the buzz of queen bumble bees emerging from their winter nests to forage for pollen.  Most of the early bulbs have now faded away and it is prima donna season for shimmering white daffodils and tulips in a rainbow of warm hues. My fairy crown for early May is a celebration of mid-spring abundance featuring tulips in peach, pink and lilac; ‘Geranium’, ‘Stainless’ and ‘Thalia’ daffodils; peachy ‘Gipsy Queen’ hyacinth still in flower; blue-and-white grape hyacinths (Muscari aucheri ‘Ocean Magic’); wine-red snakeshead fritillary (Fritillaria meleagris); a truss of magenta ‘PJM’ rhododendron; the delicate red blossoms of my Japanese maple (Acer palmatum); and the first tiny, blue flowers of perennial Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla).

Now is also the time when I rummage through my cupboards searching out small vases, shot glasses, votive candle holders and favorite mugs to hold these long-awaited blossoms to bring the joy and fragrance of spring indoors.

My front garden flanks the city sidewalk – no fence, no obstacles for neighbours and passersby who wish to stop and gaze or capture the flowers with their cell phone. And it’s never more popular than now, when the bulbs bloom in riotous profusion in what will be a towering prairie months later – no single-color blocks for me! 

I’ve never understood gardeners who turn down their noses at tulips. Yes, they’re gaudy!  Isn’t that the point?  We need color after a long winter.

The ‘Shogun’ tulips continue to open while the big Fosteriana tulip ‘Orange Emperor’ starts to flower as well.  I mentioned how much I love orange, right?

Each autumn, I add to the assortment, but old favourites include the big Darwin Hybrids ‘Pink Impression’….

… and ‘Apricot Impression’…

…. and the elegant lily-flowered tulip ‘Ballerina’. 

Other tulips in my spring repertoire that have hung around for more than a few seasons are the luscious double ‘Lilac Perfection’….

…. and the double fringed tulip ‘Crispion Sweet’.

Fragrance in daffodils is important to me, as are longevity and a tendency to multiply. I love the spicy scent of the old Tazetta cultivar ‘Geranium’, with its clustered, shimmering-white flowers with orange cups, like a hardy paperwhite.

And the Triandus hybrid daffodil ‘Thalia’ – sometimes called the orchid narcissus – is another winner. Its dainty, white flowers with their reflexed petals are lovely in spring nosegays, especially with blue grape hyacinths.

Here is ‘Thalia’ in the garden; you can see how it multiplies. And you can also see my favourite little Narcissus ‘Golden Echo’ still in bloom behind.

I do have a fondness for white daffodils (as well as ‘Golden Echo’), and I love those with salmon-pink trumpets, like ‘Pink Charm’, below.

Finally, there’s the Large Cup daffodil ‘Stainless’ with pure white flowers, on the left below.  

The hyacinths from my last fairy crown fade in colour but stay in flower for a long period. Because I love plant combinations of blue and orange, I mix the bulbs of peach-orange ‘Gipsy Queen’ hyacinth and blue-and-white grape hyacinth Muscari aucheri ‘Ocean Magic’ together with delightful results!  

That little grape hyacinth is a stunner in tiny bouquets, too. Here it is with Narcissus ‘Thalia’, Muscari latifolium and Anemone blanda ‘Blue Shades’.

Snake’s head fritillary (Fritillaria meleagaris) is an elegant dark horse in the mid-spring garden with its pendulous, checkered, wine-red flowers. The specific ephithet meleagris means “spotted like a guinea fowl” so another common name is the guinea hen flower.

Though it’s not featured in my crown, another bulb blooming in my garden at this time is summer snowflake, Leucojum aestivum ‘Gravetye Giant’ (which, despite its name, is a spring-bloomer).  I don’t have nearly enough of these elegant flowers.

We often think of Japanese maples (Acer palmatum) primarily as specimen trees, but stand near one in flower on a sunny day in spring….

…. and try to count the native bees buzzing around the tiny, pendulous, red blossoms, like this spring-active Andrena bee.  That’s the little dangling red jewel over my right eye in the fairy crown.

My old tree is planted in a south-facing site in front of our living room windows where it is protected from the cold, north wind – and serves as my leafy curtain from May through November.  Here it is outside my 2nd-floor window (and that’s my husband strolling out in a spring shower.)

Heading into my back garden, we find the tiny blue flowers of Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla), a frothy groundcover perennial under spring bulbs. It thrives in part shade and is low-maintenance, ultra-hardy, long-flowering and unbothered by pests or disease. There are many variegated-leaf cultivars, but I am partial to the regular species with its lush green leaves. Here it is growing with rhubarb and European wild ginger (Asarum europaeum).

My back garden has a thriving population of ostrich ferns, which is a nice way of saying they’re very successful invaders. Growing amidst them are lots of mid-season tulips whose names I’ve long forgotten, but I believe the magenta-pink one is ‘Don Quichotte’. Aren’t they pretty?

Not all plants in a garden last indefinitely. Some barely hang on, others fight disease, some struggle with winter temperatures – and that’s the case with my Mezitt-hybrid Rhododendron ‘PJM’. At one time, I had three of these hardy, small-flowered shrubs near my lily pond, but over the years they declined, leaving just one to greet spring with its clusters of outrageously brilliant magenta flowers – and a place of honor in my fairy crown.

Speaking of my crown, I’ll leave with a little bouquet of my deconstructed Fairy Crown #4.  What could be prettier than these lovely May flowers?

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Want to see more of my Fairy Crowns? 

#1 – Spring Awakening
#2 – Little Blossoms for Easter
#3 – The Perfume of Hyacinths 

Tulips as Metaphor

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It was a March afternoon with the promise of spring in the air – which was good, because spring officially started on the calendar two days later. But we in the northeast know how cruelly the calendar can be tricked into saying things it doesn’t really mean, like “spring”. I was at the greengrocer a few blocks from my house to buy kale and strawberries, but I treated myself to two bunches of double tulips at the premium price of 2 for $13.99.  A mediocre wine can be had for that price, but it wouldn’t make me swoon like those goblets of yellow and suffused rose. 

I arranged them in a vase and placed them on a pretty trivet, a gift from my sister-in-law. It was made by her sister, who used the time spent recovering from an injury to learn a beautiful new craft. The tulips seemed honoured and bowed left and right as if in frilly crinolines.

I gazed at them through my glass of chardonnay until they hit the high-wine level where, magically, mysteriously, they and the lupine print and the kitchen window turned upside down in the refracted light. This is explained by the formula of Snell’s Law of Refraction, which I advise you to look up, since I am unable to explain it beyond this:  it is the bending of the path of a light wave as it passes across the boundary separating two media, and it’s caused by the change in speed of said wave when it changes its medium.

On Day 2, the tulips opened in the warmth of my kitchen. These two cultivars, yellow ‘Verona’ and bicoloured ‘Verona Sunrise’ are the work of Dutch tulip breeders and hundreds of years of hybridizing from their wild tulip progenitors in central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan) and the Mediterranean. In formal tulip classification, my tulips are called “Double Early”.  They would have been grown hydroponically in a greenhouse in southern Ontario’s Niagara region and shipped to the grower’s stalls at Toronto’s wholesale Ontario Food Terminal where my greengrocer will have purchased the bunches in tight bud early in the morning.

Tulips are members of the Liliaceae family and Yellow ‘Verona’ has stamens with yellow pollen…..

….. while ‘Verona Sunrise’ has dramatic black pollen.

While many people would talk about colourful tulip “petals”, in botany they are referred to as “tepals” since tulips do not bear the sepals we see in many plant families and instead emerge directly at the top of strong stems.

By Day 3, my tulips had opened enough in the warmth of the kitchen that the adjective “blowsy” seemed to apply. But I looked up that word I’ve used to describe certain double peonies and perfumed roses to discover this etymology: Blowsy – “disheveled, unkempt,” 1778, from obsolete blouze “wench, beggar’s trull”. Hmmm, I felt I should have apologized to my tulips, which seemed to have let their morals slip in just two days.

Three days later, ‘Verona Sunrise’ had lost her will. She was on a downward slide….splayed and tired. Perhaps because of my own advancing years, it occurred to me that I should not toss the wilted blossoms into the recycling bin, but rejoice in their decline.

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Besides, my bouquet still had a relaxed integrity, though ‘Verona’ swooped towards the table with nothing to catch her except the rim of the vase.

Day 8 brought a kind of silken elegance to the tulip’s dénouement….

…. and the flowers seemed less like a bouquet and more like abstract still life, frozen in time.

But the virile, jet-black pollen still swirled around the stamens… a dark vestige of its place in nature, in the mysterious, ancient sex life of the tulip.

It was Sunday dinner; my son was arriving to share the table, so I invited the elderly tulips to be our guests.  And we decanted a hearty red wine to toast them.

On the 12th day, the tulips begged for mercy. It was almost time to say goodbye…. almost.

Finally, fifteen days after I brought them home, youthful and freshly budded, old age staked its claim. Black and yellow pollen showered the table amidst the faded tepals.

Dust unto dust, carbon unto carbon. To everything – and everyone – its season.

Amsterdam…. Spring Sunshine

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I’ve been to the Netherlands a few times, but the first time in 1976 (below) I was there without a camera. It shocks me to think about it now, but there was actually a time when I walked around just… looking at things. I suppose I used my mind to remember things instead of filming them. Sometimes I even forgot things I’d seen. I didn’t have a computer then, either; instead I used a Selectric typewriter at my job each day. On that trip from Vancouver to Amsterdam, someone else took my photo as I arrived on the inaugural flight of CP Air (now part of Air Canada) to the Netherlands on a route over the polar region. Why was I on the flight? Evidently, the company I worked for did so much business with the airline that we were invited to send one employee as a free guest. So here I am with my 70s hippie headscarf on my very first trip to Europe. I do remember that there were tulips in flower and I was enamored with the Rijksmuseum and the funky houseboats on the canal. I recall seeing the bulb fields on that Dutch sojourn (but who can be sure, if they’re just memories and not Kodak prints?) I flew to London a few days later and stayed near Earl’s Court with some backpackers from Australia.

All of this is my way of confirming that I did actually visit the city of Amsterdam itself once in the spring sunshine (which relates to #mysongscapes). On my second visit to the Netherlands with my husband in April 1999, we drove from the airport in Amsterdam to the town of Lisse by way of the spectacular bulb fields, below, in order to visit the nearby Keukenhof Garden. By then I’d been writing a weekly gardening column for a Toronto newspaper for six years and a camera was very much part of my baggage. It was the beginning of a road trip to surprise our daughter, then an exchange student in French Alsace, for her 17th birthday. On the way, we would visit Hummelo so I could talk to Piet Oudolf, who was then becoming popular internationally for his landscape designs. (I wrote about that visit in a 2-part blog on the Oudolf entry border at the Toronto Botanical Garden.)

In the countryside near Lisse hundreds of colourful bulb fields tempt travellers to leave their cars and snap photographs.

You often see workers walking down the rows picking the withered flowers so the energy goes into the bulbs they’ll sell that autumn. The rows on the left were of early-blooming tulips whose flowers have been picked.  As with all spring bulbs, once the flowers are finished the foliage should be left to turn yellow; all that continuing photosynthesis improves the vigor of the bulb.

Given the long flowering season of tulips, from the earliest botanical or species tulips, to the late-flowering cottage tulips, the Dutch bulb fields are in flower for up to 2 months.

I arranged in advance to visit the Keukenhof early in the morning, before the tour buses arrived, so we had it to ourselves for an hour or so. Six hundred years ago, the Keukenhof Gardens were the domain of the Countess of Holland, Jacoba van Beiren.  The Countess hosted hunting parties on the grounds and grew herbs and vegetables for her castle kitchen in the rich soil.  (Keukenhof is Dutch for “kitchen garden”).  In 1840, the Keukenhof was laid out as park similar to one in Amsterdam.

It included the pond that still exists today, presided over by a coterie of pure white swans, below.  It wasn’t until 1949 that the mayor of Lisse, along with ten bulb-growers, decided to use the property as annual open-air showcase for the tulips, hyacinths, daffodils and other spring bulbs they grew.  The first year, 236,000 visitors passed through the Keukenhof’s gates to see the bulb show.

Today, Countess van Beiren’s kitchen garden has become the world’s biggest flower garden, a 32-hectare (79-acre) park filled with 7 million spectacular bulbs.  The growers now number one hundred.  But those “hunting parties” are still there:  in 2019, 1.5 million visited Keukenhof during its 8-week open period, arriving between mid-March and mid-May to wander along the 15 kilometers of paths hunting for that perfect tulip, narcissus or crocus for their garden back home. That’s the big Darwin Hybrid ‘Pink Impression’, below.

Each fall, thirty gardeners begin the gargantuan task of planting the bulbs that will bloom the following spring.  They’re planted in layers to ensure a long season of sequential bloom, placing late-blooming tulips deepest, then the early-blooming tulips, and finally the crocuses near the surface of the soil.

The garden styles at the Keukenhof are as varied as the bulbs themselves.  One grower will plant in natural drifts in the woods.

Another might plant in geometric rows that resemble a living Mondrian painting.

Another conjures up a broad, azure-blue river of grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum).  Few home gardeners would have the resources – or the desire — to landscape in vast blocks of color this way, but that’s not the point.  According to the Flowerbulb Information Center in Holland, the display is meant to inspire gardeners, showing them how to use color effectively and teaching how to combine certain bulbs with an eye to height and form.

There are many beautiful flowering Japanese Cherry trees on the grounds that enhance the beauty of the bulbs.

Throughout the Keukenhof, there are growers’ shops where visitors can order bulbs that have caught their eye, and through the magic of international commerce, by September or October, they’ll be digging those very same tulips into their own flower beds, whether they live in Paris or Peoria or Philadelphia.

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There are even places to sit and relax (something my husband did while I rushed about looking at bulb combinations.)

I visited Keukenhof that spring on April 24-25 and the gardens were at their very peak of perfection.  I chose that date because it coincided with the famous Bulb Parade, below, and I assumed that the growers would plan the parade for peak bloom time. For more information on the Keukenhof Gardens including specific opening dates, times and admission prices, visit their web site.

While at the Keukenhof, I made some abstract multiple-exposure photos: vortexes, swirls…

… and impressionist views of the colourful rows of tulips….

… and daffodils.

In the spring of 2000, I used one of those Keukenhof tulip abstracts as the cover for a marketing brochure for an upstart online company for which I’d been asked to provide content, below, in exchange for “future considerations”.

Later that year, just as we were starting to line up vendors for all our products, gardencrazy was purchased by a big book company, Chapters Online, a division of the bookstore Chapters. A big corporate expansion and lots of “seed money” followed. I was made garden magazine editor and we finally launched with my welcome editorial, below. Months later, we were purchased by the competing big-box bookstore, Indigo Books, and its owner closed us down. But I did manage to save my story pages onto my computer as relics of a long-ago career experience.

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So…. how does music fit into this Dutch-flavoured #mysongscapes blog? Well, that’s another interesting detour in my eclectic career moves. If you’ve followed my blog, you might know the story of the years from 2008-2010 when I worked on a theatrical adaptation of the music of the late California singer-songwriter John Stewart. It’s a bit complicated, but you’ll find that blog here under Daydream Believer – the John Stewart Songbook.  While I was working on it, I visited New York City to do some garden photography and bought a single ticket to the Belasco Theatre’s showing of Passing Strange.  The title came from Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ and it was the semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age story of a young black boy from Los Angeles who visits Amsterdam and has his eyes opened to a very liberated way of looking at life. The author/composer was Stew (Mark Stewart) and his band The Negro Problem performed the music. I have tallied the number of Broadway musicals I’ve seen in my life and they number fifty-five from Kismet and Annie Get Your Gun and Carousel with my mom at Vancouver’s TUTS (Theatre Under the Stars) in Stanley Park when I was a pre-teen in Vancouver to Fun Home, Beautiful, Come from Away and Hamilton at this end of my life (I might have missed a few). But Passing Strange is my favourite; it was fresh and utterly original, but not terribly tourist-friendly like Phantom or Cats. After all, there was “hashish on the menu”!  It won a Tony for Best Musical Screenplay and was beloved  by critics and those audiences that did manage to see it. In fact, director Spike Lee decided to film it in its closing days. Have a listen to  Amsterdam which most definitely does not have anything to do with tulips!

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This is the 13th blog in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading, have a look at the others beginning with

  1. Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’;
  2. Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and my life in photography;
  3. Vietnam and Songs of Protest;
  4. Galway Bay and memories of my grandfather and Ireland;
  5. Simon and Garfunkel’s Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme;
  6. The John Denver lullaby I sang to my first grandchild, Today While the Blossoms Still Cling to the Vine.
  7. Gordon Lightfoot for a Snow Day
  8. Madame George by Van Morrison – my favourite song in the world
  9. Brown Eyed Girl(s) – Van Morrison’s classic and my black-eyed susans
  10. Raindrops – on flowers and in my gardens
  11. Miss Rumphius and the Lupines
  12. Bring me Little Water – on water in the garden

If you enjoyed this blog, please feel free to leave a comment below. I love to read them.

Early Spring Blossoms at the Toronto Botanical Garden

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I popped by the Toronto Botanical Garden this morning for a quick look at what’s in bloom. It’s been such a long, cold winter and reluctant spring, an hour in the garden was just the therapy I needed. So what did I see?  Well, in all the years I’ve been photographing at the TBG, I’ve never spied the cornelian cherry (Cornus mas) in the hedge cages in flower. With the ‘marcescent’ foliage (persisting through winter) of the beeches (Fagus sylvatica), it made a unique and lovely entrance to the George and Kathy Dembroski Centre for Horticulture, the main building.

There were loads of hellebores doing their thing. Helleborus ‘Red Lady’ is a long-time performer and has multiplied beautifully beside the stone wall of the building. I loved the sober backdrop it made for flamboyant Narcissus ‘Tiritomba’.

I found a nice assortment of hellebores under the ‘Merrill’ magnolia just opening. This is Helleborus x ericsmithii HGC Merlin (‘Coseh 810’). Isn’t it lovely?

Helleborus x ballardiae HGC Cinnamon Snow (‘Coseh 700’) was spicing things up.

And Helleborus x ballardiae HGC Ice Breaker Prelude (‘Coseh 830’) was meltingly gorgeous.

In a protected corner of the Westview Terrace, Magnolia x loebneri ‘Leonard Messel’ was in full flower.

I could photograph magnolias all day.

Containers of spring bulbs brought a welcome note of colour.

Nearby was a little reticulated iris still in flower. Though it was labelled differently, I think its the McMurtrie cultivar Iris reticulata ‘Velvet Smile’.
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On the bank where donkey tail spurge (Euphorbia myrsinites) scrambles, the variegated Tulipa praestans ‘Unicum’ was in flower.

Incidentally, the tulip season at the Toronto Botanical Garden is very long and beautiful. I wrote a long blog last year about TBG’s tulip stunning combinations.

Hyacinths (Hyacinthus orientalis) just need a little warmth to emit their perfume……

….. and even graced the path to the TBG’s big compost piles, along with daffodils.

Speaking of daffodils, I thought this one in the Entrance Courtyard was pretty spectacular. Meet Narcissus ‘British Gamble’.

The small bulbs were mostly finished, but glory-of-the-snow Scillia luciliae ‘Pink Giant’ (formerly Chionodoxa) was fading but still beautiful.

As I walked along the Piet Oudolf-designed entry border toward my car, I saw a favourite tulip, T. kaufmanniana ‘Ice Stick’ looking slender and lovely beside emerging perennials that will soon fill the garden with blossoms that will charm visitors until autumn. And I thought how wonderful each and every spring seems, to the winter-weary gardener.

PS – I will very soon get back to New Zealand… and the Argentina part of our wine tour. Promise! (Unless spring keeps beguiling me……..)

 

Design With Tulips Like the (Soon-to-be-Much Bigger) Toronto Botanical Garden

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In the past week, a few tidbits of information came across my desk. One was that the National Garden Bureau declared 2018 to be “The Year of the Tulip”. Well…. yawn. I tend to be a bit jaded on “The Year of”…. anything. I suppose it’s my nature to be cynical (ha!), but sometimes these public relation campaigns seem to be more about pumping sales (see those “Buy Now” links in the NGB’s right hand column? they lead to a Pennsylvania bulb dealer) than recognizing a true standout plant – or, as they say at the National Garden Bureau, a “bulb crop”.  Anyway, it is spring, and I love tulips (that’s my front garden last spring from a previous blog, below), so okay, I’ll dial back my cynicism. YAY tulips! It’s your year! Party like it’s 1999!

The other tidbit that crossed my desk was a press release from the Toronto Botanical Garden, below.

This was BIG NEWS and more than 3 years in the making, thanks to the inspiration and impetus from Executive Director Harry Jongerden and the design and consulting skills of Forrec Ltd., W. Gary Smith and Lord Cultural Resources. From the initial meeting I attended in January 2015, when the TBG unveiled its “Integrated Conceptual Proposals”, to the three community input meetings hosted by the TBG and its consultants and landscape architects and the City of Toronto, below, to May 2018’s announcement, it represents a massive leap for our little jewel of a botanical garden.

My sincere wish is that this brave new parks/not-for-profit partnership gets all the financial resources it needs to create a magnificent, world-class garden in the fourth largest metropolitan city in North America!

So, given how prone I am to dubiously connecting one thing with another – and given that it IS spring – here  are some fabulous ideas for tulips courtesy of the Toronto Botanical Garden and my 10-year archive of photos there, since the year it renamed itself and gave us so much inspiration on its 4 acres, soon to be 35 acres!

Plant them with daffodils!

This should be obvious, but it’s amazing that more people don’t interplant and underplant tulips with daffodils. The TBG is all over this idea, and here are some of the prettiest examples, starting with tiny daffodils (I’m going to guess ‘Tête à Tête‘) under the Darwin Hybrid tulip ‘World Peace’.

What about Tulipa ‘Orange Emperor’ with Narcissus ‘Thalia’?

If you like butterfly or split corona daffodils, try Narcissus ‘Printal’ with ‘Orange Emperor’.

Speaking of the Fosteriana tulip ‘Orange Emperor’, it plays a big spring role at the TBG. Here it is at the start of the Piet Oudolf-designed Entry Border with Narcissus ‘Professor Einstein’. So sturdy!

And this charming duo is Tulipa ‘Tom Pouce’ and Narcissus ‘Golden Echo’.

Plant them with grape hyacinths & real hyacinths!

If you’ve been to Holland’s Keukenhof Gardens in springtime, you’ll be familiar with those “rivers of blue” grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum). You can do that in your own garden, you know.  When you’re planting your tulips, give them little rivers or lakes or even puddles of blue companions, like this.  The light pink tulip here is ‘Ollioules’, the purple is ‘Passionale’, and the double narcissus is ‘Cheerfulness’.

Years ago, I found this duo at the TBG: Tulipa saxatilis ‘Lilac Wonder’ and Muscari armeniacum. Nice, right?

And look at this sumptuous vignette: Tulipa ‘Fire Queen’ with blue grape hyacinths (Muscari armeniacum and the emerging chartreuse foliage of golden tansy (Tanacetum vulgare ‘Isla Gold’).

I wish I had a name for the early tulip planted under the ‘Crimson Queen’ Japanese maple with its deep-red emerging leaves, below. But given that it’s interplanted with early-season hyacinths, it’s bound to be a single early tulip like ‘Couleur Cardinal’.

This little species tulip T. turkestanica seems right at home with fragrant hyacinths….

….as does the species T. humilis var. violacea.

Plant them with summer snowflake!

I don’t see a lot of summer snowflake (Leucojum aestivum) – which, despite its name, blooms in mid-spring, not summer – used in gardens, but it can be very pretty as a tulip companion. Here is L. aestivum ‘Gravetye Giant’ with ‘Daydream’…..

…. and in a more shaded position enhancing Tulipa sylvestris, the woodland tulip.

Pair them with emerging shrubs!

Why waste the drama of dark-leaved shrubs like Weigela ‘Wine & Roses’, when you can surround it with Tulipa ‘Queen of Night’? The peach tulip here is ‘Menton’, the white is ‘White Triumphator’.

Fothergilla gardenii is a spring-flowering native northeastern shrub that’s wonderful in combination with mid to late-season tulips. Here it is at Toronto Botanical Garden this spring.

Don’t forget that colourful coniferous shrubs can pair up nicely with tulips, like Tulipa ‘Purple Dream’ with the lime-gold foliage of dwarf golden arborvitae (Platycladus orientalis ‘Aurea Nana’).

Combine them with spring-flowering perennials!

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Then there’s Bergenia or ‘pigsqueak’ (why? I don’t know). This cultivar is ‘Eden’s Dark Margin’ and it’s been paired with Tulipa ‘Ice Stick’ and a dusky purple hellebore.

As an aside to ‘Ice Stick’, I found this little Kaufmanniana hybrid to be quite attractive to bees at the Toronto Botanical Garden.

The amsonias flower early and look great with late tulips. This is Amsonia orientalis with a white-edged tulip I believe is the triumph tulip ‘Kung Fu’ and the blowsy double early tulip ‘Monte Orange’.

And I love this serene combination of blue Siberian bugloss (Brunnera macrophylla) with Tulipa ‘Spring Green’.

…. and variegated Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum x hybridum ‘Striatum’) with Tulipa ‘Exotic Emperor’.

Cushion spurge (Euphorbia polychroma) is one of the earliest perennials and combines nicely with tulips of all colours. Shown below is pink ‘Ollioules’.

Combine them with Ornamental Grasses!

I adored this soft Tulipa ‘Silverstream’ and Carex combo from 2009, and some of those, variegated, colour-variable tulips still pop up, though the carex is long gone. But that’s the funny thing with carex. The brown New Zealand species like C. buchananii and C. comans often look pretty much the same in spring even when they’ve died in winter, so they make good tulip companions.

This is Deschampsia caespitosa with the burgundy-yellow, late tulip ‘Gavota’ and dark ‘Queen of Night’.  I think this is stunning.

And you can weave tulips like a colourful river through grasses, as was done with these double-flowered tulips ‘Pink Star’ and ‘Monte Orange’ through emerging Calamagrostis brachytricha.

Fill their dance cards with pretty cousins!

Sometimes, certain tulips just seem to go well together, and the TBG has created some lovely combinations over the years. This pair is tulip royalty ‘Fire Queen’ and ‘Pretty Princess’.

In the same bed along Lawrence Avenue is a delicate pairing of purple Tulipa ‘Rem’s Favourite’ with pink ‘Playgirl‘.

Those romantic hues are used to lovely effect in Nature’s Garden, in the combination below of the triumph tulip ‘Synaeada Blue’ with two luscious parrot tulips, ‘Negrita Parrot’ and ‘Pink Vision’.

Playing a double striped against a single striped with similar colouring works with the double late tulip ‘Cartouche’ and the triumph tulip ‘Carnaval de Rio’ (aka ‘Canada 150’).

I thought this was a very clever combination of fringed tulips, with one colour reversing the other. The red is ‘Flamenco’; the yellow is ‘Davenport’.

And sometimes you have a tulip so beautiful, like luminous, yellow ‘Akebono’ (a double sport of the Darwin Hybrid ‘Jewel of Spring’), below, that anything looks good with it, including ‘Orange Emperor’ and ‘Purple Dream’.

You can riff on a cultivar name and get pretty combinations, like ‘Apricot Delight’ with ‘Apricot Impression‘ (both Darwin Hybrids).

I am very fond of pink and yellow combinations in spring, and this vignette from 2016 was one of my favourites: ‘Rosy Delight’, ‘Design Impression’, ‘Jenny’ and yellow ‘West Point’. (It should be noted that spring weather will often accelerate certain tulip types or delay others, and what combines one spring might be sequential the following spring – the luck of the draw.)

I may be a subtle meadow girl the rest of the year, but I don’t mind a boisterous spring garden party. How about this double-flowered tulip duo: yellow-orange-red ‘Sun Lover’ and ‘Double Negrita’?

Or this sunny party act: ‘Fire Wings‘and the late double ‘Sundowner’, with its changing sunset hues.

In truth, I love all tulips. After 5 months of winter, we all want a little party of colour, I think, and tulips offer an easy way to celebrate. Here’s a multicolour party, courtesy of the TBG.

Many of these tulips are in plantings donated by my friends Mary Fisher (the Mary Fisher Spring Garden near the shop) and Bob & Anne Fisher and other family members (the Ruby Fisher garden) near the fence in the Oudolf entry border.  Hurray to them!  And, on that cheerful note, I’d like to raise a glass – a tulip glass with a long stem – to Sandra Pella and Paul Zammit and the gardening staff of the Toronto Botanical Garden on its lovely tulip displays. And also a toast to Harry Jongerden and a much-expanded garden with a much-expanded vision (and hopefully, a much-expanded gardening staff)!

Finally, I would like to send out a little shout to the woman who supplies many of the Toronto Botanical Garden’s spring bulbs, my friend Caroline de Vries. If you’re Canadian and looking to buy excellent-quality bulbs at a very good price, check out Caroline’s company  https://flowerbulbsrus.com/.  It’s where I buy my bulbs!