Many colours of tulip are scattered across the borders here; not in the solid blocks in which they are often seen in public gardens, but in looser groups, with colours drifting into each other. It is the kind of distribution you might expect to see from wild flowers, flourishing in a place where conditions are good, but less so where they face competition. And competition there clearly is, as the tulips are coming up, not out of bare ground, but among a wide variety of emerging perennials.
Welcome to Hermannshof, in Germany’s Rhine Valley, a public garden of five acres that for some time now has been possibly the most exciting place in Europe to see innovative, scientifically led planting design. Its full name is Schau- und Sichtungsgarten Hermannshof (‘display and trial garden’) and it offers an opportunity to research ornamental plants and planting design, then show off the results to both the gardening public and landscape professionals. The first garden of this kind in Germany was established just north of Munich in the early Fifties. Hermannshof was developed in the Eighties, part of the concept being that this would be a garden of a very different climate, with an almost Mediterranean, ‘vineyard’ feel. The planting is strongly naturalistic, with an emphasis on natural perennial species or cultivars derived from them.
There has been a garden on this site since the 19th century, with the first full design made in the Twenties for the Freudenberg family – local industrialists, who still own the garden and continue to fund it (in collaboration with the town of Weinheim). A former family villa, now a conference centre for the Freudenberg business, sits at its heart, and there is a splendid legacy of heritage trees and views over distant forested hills.
The feel is that of a very superior town centre public park. The garden’s first director, Urs Walser, laid out a series of biotopes, planting combinations that matched varieties to particular habitats, but also mixing forms or colours for maximum appeal. This intermingling resembled how plants grow in nature, acting as prototypes for a successful range of commercial plant mixes that can now be seen in public places across Germany. Among the initial plantings there were a few tulips.
The current director, Cassian Schmidt, took over in 1998. He greatly extended the planted areas, with an emphasis on North American prairie vegetation for its late-season good looks and pollinator-friendliness, and planted lots more tulips – hybrids, rather than species. In a way this seems counterintuitive for a garden where the emphasis is on the naturalistic, but the hybrids appear only in the more stylised plantings in front of the gardener’s house; species tulips are used exclusively in the more naturalistic, intermingled plantings.
However, what the tulips (and other bulbs) do is to make use of plant growth cycles to create two very distinct gardens, separated not in space but time. There is the early-summer-onwards garden of naturalistic perennials and then there is the very artistic – more artificial – spring bulb garden. The two involve plants that extract their resources (water and nutrients) from the soil at different times. As soon as the soil begins to warm up in spring, bulbs get into rapid growth. Most perennials and shrubs are slower to wake up (they need higher temperatures), so by the time their roots are pulling water and nutrients out, the bulbs are starting to die back. Tulips work especially well, as they complete their life cycle quickly, but daffodils have active roots and leaves for much longer, which can compete with perennials, either culturally or visually.
The conventional wisdom is that tulips do not repeat flower well from year to year, and that to do so they need ‘baking’, ie exposure to heat. Neither is really true, believes Cassian, particularly in Hermannshof’s sandy soil. ‘Many varieties repeat flower well,’ he says, ‘especially Darwin hybrids and earlier-flowering varieties – some fosteriana varieties are 30 years old – but those bred for cut-flowers always decline.’ The bulb industry has no interest in revealing long-term performance to consumers, and relatively little garden-based research has been done so he has proceeded by trial-and-error. ‘Kingsblood’ (scarlet), ‘Dordogne’ (pink, turning red and orange at the edges), ‘Menton’ (pink, fading around edges) and ‘Maureen’ (white) are four tulips he rates as true performers, all of them tall, single and classified as ‘late season’. Viridiflora varieties last well too – perhaps, he thinks, as the chlorophyll in the green parts of their petals helps boost their ability to photosynthesise. He reckons lily-flowered tulips also tend to be long-lived.
‘I tend to mix five or six varieties in a single planting,’ says Cassian, ‘not as a true mixture, but with transitions between the colours.’ He refers to the planting style as ‘pointillist’, in contrast to the traditional use of rigid blocks of single varieties. He also likes to ‘match tulips with young perennial foliage such as Penstemon digitalis ‘Husker Red’ or with primulas’. Locations tend to be in full sun, although the exuberant growth of the perennials that are the garden’s mainstay will inevitably shade the soil where they grow through the summer. Cassian finds that some do surprisingly well in light shade but also cope well with tree root competition, possibly because this helps to keep the soil dry.
There are other bulbs here – early ones like crocuses and chionodoxas for early spring and alliums for late. While integrating these with perennials is not a new idea, the incredible success of the tulips is an inspiration to us all to be more daring in the spring garden.
Schau- und Sichtungsgarten Hermannshof: sichtungsgartenhermannshof. de. Please check the website for opening hours
