Planting Combinations #3

A combination for spring to look forward to

This week I have a spring combination from my own garden. I first wrote about it for a series in House & Garden last year (you’ll find a link to the full article at the end of this post) with a beautiful flat lay photograph by Eva Nemeth (above). What wasn’t included in the article was a photograph of the actual planting scheme in my garden, so I’m revealing my own iphone snaps of the border in this post.

Border Analysis

This combination is in my southwest facing front garden, in one of six brick edged beds – a scheme for mid-to-late April with tulips as the focal point. I’ve been lucky in this garden in that a lot of the tulips I planted six years ago have come back with plenty of vigour every year since. ‘Ballerina’, ‘Spring Green’, ‘Black Hero’ and ‘La Belle Epoque’ have all thrived, and it is the latter two that feature in this scheme. I really wasn’t expecting ‘La Belle Epoque’ to be as perennial, because hybrid tulips in general tend to get increasingly small and weak with each year that passes. The viridifloras (like ‘Spring Green’) and some of the lily flowered tulips (like ‘Ballerina’), as well as some of the triumph tulips, are known to be more perennial than others, but I had no expectation that these two double tulips would be as successful as they have been. ‘La Belle Epoque’ is one of those tulips that fades absolutely beautifully, and I love it almost more in its final stages, as it is in the photographs below.