118 GARDENING


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Tulip Celebrations


Springtime blooms for a little April cheer, plus bursaries up for grabs, jobs to do in the garden this month, diary dates, and is it too early to start pruning shrubs and trimming hedges?


Caroline Knight Diary dates


Great Comp Garden, the enchanting hide-away in Platt, near Sevenoaks, has a series of horticultural events lined up to celebrate 50 years since fi rst opening its doors to the public. Golden anniversary events in April include: • Sunday 15th – Spring Fling, Plant Fair & Rediscovering Magnolias Lecture • For more information, including admission/ticket prices and to book for the lecture, visit www. greatcompgarden.co.uk


Hever Castle & Gardens Tulip Celebration will be even bigger this year with 20,000 tulips blooming in the spectacular gardens at Anne Boleyn’s childhood home from 18th-27th April. For the fi rst time, the event will celebrate the Elizabethan horticultural boom with historical retellings of the tulip’s journey to England and its links to nobility at the castle. Outside in the grounds of the castle, visitors will be able to enjoy a tulip trail either self-guided or with Hever’s Head Gardener Neil Miller (pictured) and marvel at the 20,000 tulips, in a myriad of colours and different varieties planted in the castle grounds. It could be said that Hever


Castle & Gardens is the perfect place for a Tulip Celebration because as the home of a wealthy nobleman in the late 1500s and early 1600s the castle would have been involved in what’s been described as the ‘fi rst English gardening craze’ or the ‘Elizabethan horticultural boom’ where gardens which had formerly been dedicated to growing herbs and vegetables for the kitchen


were beginning to expand and include fl owers and plants brought from around the globe. Owners of country houses and castles, such as Hever, would have been keen to have had the latest and most fashionable of plants – especially the newly- arrived tulip from Turkey.


The interior of the castle itself will be


dressed with tulips by talented in-house fl orist Pamela Brise.


• For more information, including admission prices and opening times, visit www. hevercastle.co.uk or call 01732 865224.


© Leo Bieber


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