Gardening News

The Prince Collection

Every spring the same thing happens at Pashley Manor. Visitors walk past a great many tulips and stop at the Prince tulips, planted up in big terracotta pots. They are, by some distance, the most popular tulips with show visitors, and I have never tired of them myself.

The Prince Collection is a mixture of three of them from the same family, Candy Prince, Purple Prince and Sunny Prince. They match for height, forty centimetres or so, and flower together from the middle of April, so the display arrives all at once rather than in dribs and drabs. Three early single tulips, equally at home in a pot or the border.

In pots they are hard to beat. An early single is a short tulip with the proper old fashioned shape to the flower, and that shorter stem sits in nice proportion to a pot on the patio. They are among the first to flower as well. Earthenware is my choice for the pot, for the way it breathes, with fresh compost that is already damp when you fill it and a good few holes in the bottom. After that they want very little from you.

They are every bit as good in the ground. Planted in a mass, a block of forty-eight or more, the three colours knit together into something that looks planned without looking fussy. The larger pack is the one to reach for if you are bedding out, and for the show they put on it is good value.

That is the pleasure of a collection like this. The contrast and the harmony come in one bag, the purple against the soft yellow with the gentler Candy Prince between, and none of the head scratching over what goes with what.

Tulips wait until November to go in, so there is no hurry to plant. There is a hurry on the bulbs though. This collection outsells every other tulip we list, and it does not hang about.

Shop the Prince Collection