High Praise for Tulips

Anna Pavord.
The Curious Gardener: A Year in the Garden.

As far as I am concerned, these are the best, indeed the only flowers to send or receive on Valentine's Day. Wild, irrepressible, wayward, unpredictable, strange, subtle, generous, elegant, tulips are everything you would wish for in a lover. Best of all are the crazy parrot tulips such as 'Rococco' with red and pink petals feathered and flamed in crinkly lime-green. 'When a young man presents a tulip to his mistress,' wrote Sir John Chardin (Travels in Persia, 1686), 'he gives her to understand by the general red colour of the flower, that he is on fire with her beauty, and by the black base, that his heart is burned to coal.' That's the way to do it.

And so for day 1634
04.06.2011