gardening at home with sarah | tulips and narcissi in the dutch yard

Sarah discusses her favourite early flowering tulips and narcissi in the Dutch Yard at Perch Hill.

It’s quite tricky to manoeuvre these massive fabulous tulips out the door, this is the most beautiful tulip in the ‘impression’ series, and they’ve just come out, literally in the last few days it’s been so hot everything is just bursting into life, and so I was doing a film here only 10 days ago and it was freezing and things were only really starting but now the tulips are coming out and all the narcissus, it’s just wonderful and optimistic.

So that’s ‘Pink Impression’ and it’s an early one and you can see it couldn’t be more splendid. But this is another really early one so we’re in the first week of April, and this one’s called ‘Orca’, and when I first saw it I wasn’t so sure, but I mean it’s just so cheerful that you can’t not love it and it flowers for ages like a lot of the doubles, and then this beautiful dark one’s called ‘Antraciet’ in the same family so they’re all really lovely cracking earlies, as well as lots of these narcissus, mainly ‘Tazetta’ varieties because they have lovely scent. I adore this one called ‘Xit’, which is a horrible name, but it’s a really delicate, beautiful and very fragrant narcissus, and I really like this one too for a tablecentre pot, because it’s sort of nodding and graceful, that one’s called ‘Lemon Drops’, but without doubt my favourite this year, in the Dutch yard, because of the Amelanchiers is this variety called ‘Katie Heath’, and it’s got that sort of slightly bronze colouring to the perianth which is the trumpet in the front which picks up on the bronze colouring of the Amelanchier. I love it.

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