This year's tulips
I love tulips. For a while in my gardening life I struggled to create the effects that I wanted until I had the blinding realisation that the problem was that I was not using enough of them. Isn't it wonderful when the right answer is the exciting answer? Now I buy in bulk. I plant new ones in pots, some new ones in the ground and, when I can get my act together, some of the ones which were in last year's pots into the ground too. This is the counsel of perfection as usual and doesn't always happen. In the autumn of 2010 I remembered in time to get quite a lot into the cutting garden. Last year I lifted all my bulbs, failed to label them, left them to die down and failed to remember that they were hiding in a big pot in the kitchen garden. When I came across them in November when I was planting out my new ones I found that most of them had rotted or been eaten. Some did go into the cutting garden and into beds in the kitchen gar...