Some flowers

Tulips, roses - the lot

Tulips at Polly Nicholson’s beautiful garden

Happy Easter Monday! As with India Knight’s posts, I do hope you can read this one in bed, with coffee and a dog - or perhaps a cat. (I love the idea of reading in bed with a coffee at the weekend, but the demands of children’s breakfast - Mummy-can-I-have a crumpet/porridge/smoothie? I don’t like THIS crumpet/porridge/smoothie - usually get in the way. Although last week, I did tell Tim: ‘India says, I should read her Substack in bed. BYE!’ - though was joined very soon after by a three-year-old and then the one-year-old with various snacks in hand and it was all very much like the mummy elephant in ‘Five Minutes Peace.’ Look at her, trying to drink tea in her favourite cup, besieged by offspring:

So it was with SOME EXCITEMENT last week that I accepted an invitation to head out on a field trip. Lucy Maxwell, who writes here as

Horticulturalish

(you can find the podcast we recorded together here if you missed it) asked if I’d like to come with her and see Polly Nicholson’s garden at Blackland House. A two-and-a-half hour round trip out of London, to see some tulips? An instant yes.

I briefly considered taking both children, booking a hotel and such, before deciding that Mrs Elephant would definitely go on a day-trip by herself, even if her oldest child adores flowers - at three years old, correctly identifying camellias, magnolias, cherry trees and forsythia from the car window. (If Alba were a little older, we could make a car game out of it with points - three for a large magnolia, two for a small, one for a camellia and so on - no doubt some readers would suggest minus one for a forsythia.) And she loves arranging flowers. Forgive the ‘my marvellous child’ anecdote, but on seeing me cut and arrange tulips from the garden then fuss about with vases to get them safely to my parents’ house in the car*, Alba - off her own bat - gathered up all the fabric flowers from the nursery, found a clear plastic tube to arrange them in, then told Tim she’d picked them: ‘to take as a present to my ‘drandparents!’ We exchanged a look - the ‘omg, isn’t she cute’ look, and my heart did a little flip, before turning back to the job at hand - packing the entire kitchen into a Waitrose bag.

So, yes, I did feel quite guilty on the morning of the trip, having luxuriously organised wraparound childcare, telling Alba that I was heading out of London to see some tulips with a friend. ‘Am I coming to see the tulips too Mummy?’ Guilt guilt guilt. And an apologetic no, you’re off to nursery, honey. (To add insult to injury, I packed some of the grown-up car snacks - medjool dates - into her Peter Rabbit snack box. It’s such a convenient size!)

My guilt evaporated once she skipped into nursery. Running away for the day with a child-free adult - so your conversation is only 40% child related rather than 100% - is HEAVEN. Even if on arrival, I really did wish I’d packed the equivalent of a child’s backpack for myself - like a complete amateur, I’d let a packet of Mini Eggs spill onto (Lucy’s) car seat, and so turned up to a carpark full of Glyndebourne-posh people with melted chocolate all over my jeans. Did I have wet wipes and a change of clothes? No. Demob happy, I’d left the house with literally just my phone and keys. (Luckily the chocolate hadn’t melted in a terribly visible place - sort of mid-thigh to knee just on the inner seam, but still.)

I took about 600 photographs of the tulips on my phone, but Lucy’s were much better and taken with a proper camera - you can have a look on her Substack here - beautiful, beautiful tulips everywhere, and a glasshouse of dreams.

There was only one moment where I had to scuttle off in horror, because two braying elder yahs (we called them ‘yahs’ at Edinburgh, but believe other people say ‘rahs’) were having a ‘rah rah rah - chalet girls at our ski chalet - oh yah staff, yah!’ conversation. Fine, fine, chat about your staff - but don’t lounge against a display of tulips that literally everyone is trying to photograph! We don’t want your Barbour-jacketed hindquarters in the photo! (My ex-husband, who was delightful if almost 100% socialist and indulgently tolerated my Barbour jacket, would have sent them to a gulag.)

Polly Nicholson - who holds the National Collection of Tulips with Plant Heritage - was amazingly nice, and even though literally everyone wanted to talk to her and get her signed book ‘The Tulip Garden’, when she chatted with us it felt like there was nothing she’d rather be doing - what a gift to be able to give attention so generously! We decided we’d love to be her best friends, should she be in the market for any, and her book is just heaven. It even came with an authentic Blackland House spider squashed in it (I have removed this - with a wet wipe! They’re so versatile.)

Back home over dinner, while our dogs bickered under the table (I fell in love with Lucy’s daschund and Maltese, while Pepper planted herself on Lucy and growled if either of her own dogs tried to go near) Tim thanked Lucy for taking me out for such a lovely day-trip, even if he slightly regretted my newfound discovery of step-over fruit trees*. (I had actually gone to my GP the week before, among other things concerned about my increasingly manic garden ambitions.) Thanks to Polly and Lucy, I’ve already started a ‘Tulips 2026’ collage, putting the dates for pre-orders in my diary with my favourite bulb provider (Riverside Bulbs, but am going to get a couple from Peter Nyssen this year too.) What do you think - too many?

At the appointment, I asked my GP if it was perhaps normal to have taken up an interest so extreme that I spend every minute of my spare time researching then buying seeds, plants and roses for the garden, and then actually sowing and planting them. Both cold frames are packed on six shelves with seedlings, I just bought five roses**, with plans to grow a rambler through the ash and the lime tree by the house, and maybe some clematis after borrowing a fantastically old gardening book - ‘Creative Climbers’ - from the library. Alba has her own table of sweetcorn, melon and cucamelon seedlings to tend to, and Mia, who is one, points to the blossom on passing trees, which means she wants to inspect them, gently boop the petals with a fingertip, and quite often plant a kiss on the flowers. (The first two out of these are learned behaviour, I draw the line at the third myself.)

I explained all of this, and rather than the hard Paddington stare and referral for a section that I was expecting, instead got a kindly look from my GP. ‘You’re concerned that your interest in gardening is some sort of… manic episode?’ ‘Er… yes?’ She shook her head. You’re a middle-class woman of a certain age, I interpreted her look as saying, what could be more natural?!

My interpretation was proved right. Her final question? Not a medical one. She asked the name of the website where I had found the bargain-priced roses. And as I walked out of the door, she asked which roses I’d selected. I reeled off the ones I remembered:

‘Madame Alfred Carrière, Ghislane de Feligonde - two others, can’t remember, and - oh, and another Rosa Mundi!’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Rosa Mundi. I’ve got that one.’

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* The best way to transport tulips any distance in a car: a robust water-filled vase, and a crumpled ruff of baking paper, like a dog with a cone of shame. Ideally wedged between suitcases and bags in a way that secures the vase, while damaging none of the flowers.

**Have you ever seen a step-over fruit tree?! In my ignorance, I had not - it’s a tree trained to grow a foot horizontally above the ground - so low you could ‘step over’ it, and you could use it to edge a border or raised bed or similar. Want.

***I hope Lucy will forgive me for sharing her tip, but after our podcast and discussion of £30 roses, Lucy said she actually gets some for just a tenner. Sorry what? Her answer: niche rose growers. On her excellent Horticulturalish supplier list, you’ll find a link to Cottage Memories, where I bought these potted roses, all of which just arrived in perfect condition - bloody lovely plants at less than the cost of an Easter egg - £15 for the most expensive! I could not recommend more - they clearly spend less on their website and marketing than David Austin (who I cannot fault) but these really are too well-priced not to miss. An absolute steal. THANK YOU LUCY!

I also bought a couple more ‘Twice in a Blue Moon’ to gift - they’re an extraordinary purple rose. Back when I lived on the river, a nearby council estate had them growing in a front garden. The scent was incredible, and the flowers a massive, barely believable shade of lilac that had me wondering briefly if they’d been fed like a hydrangea to colour the petals. Wrong - a quick search informed me they were ‘Twice in a Blue Moon’, and after years of searching I found them on Peter Beale roses, and now again on Cottage Memories. Aren’t they jolly?

No filter needed - this was last year.

Thank you so much for reading this GP approved not manic post, and I hope you have a lovely rest of bank holiday Monday! Sending clear road vibes for those of you driving xx