Shot! The 2018 Arundel Castle Tulip Festival
It was the perfect day to photograph 65,000 tulips in the Earl’s Garden
If I’m not mistaken, this was Arundel Castle’s third annual tulip festival. Most are planted within the walls of the Earl’s Garden, but swathes of different tulips appear throughout the castle grounds. This year there were significantly more blooms, some 65,000, compared with 38,000 in 2017. To my knowledge, that makes it by far the biggest tulip festival in the UK. Hever Castle in Kent, for example, has just 20,000 blooms at its tulip festival and Pashley Manor in East Sussex has 40,000 at theirs.
Whilst the definitive Spring flower, tulips bloom at different times depending on the temperature and rain during winter and springtime. A cold winter and springtime can cause a later blooming and warm weather causes them to bloom earlier.
As they are generally in bloom for just a three-week window, seeing tulips at their prime however requires either being lucky or an inside track. Having only just caught them last year, and with all the cold weather we’ve had, I was taking no chances this time and asked head gardener, Martin Duncan, when he expected them to be at their very best. April 24th was his precise reply, so that was the day I went.
Following a gorgeous sunny weekend, the warmest of the year so far, the weather on the 24th was typical of an April day in West Sussex: mostly overcast, with a few sunny spells, before turning cold and blustery.
The overcast conditions actually worked in my favour. Fewer visitors to the gardens made it easier to get expansive compositions without constantly having to wait for people to move out of frame. I’d also read that overcast skies are the best for shooting flowers. I’m not so sure. To me, flowers look most vibrant when there’s some sun.
Weather apart, my first observation on entering the Earl’s Garden was that despite having so many more tulips than last year, the display didn’t actually look that noticeably different. The centrepiece is the Labyrinth. To my eyes, it looked the same as the year before. The same colour tulips planted in the same pattern. That’s disappointing when you want — even expect — to see something different from one year to the next.
The tulips themselves were looking superb, whether in the Labyrinth, the wild flower garden , around the Arun Fountain or in the various pots and beds within the Earl’s Garden. With 120 varieties on display — almost 50 more than last year — it’s hugely frustrating none are labelled.
Not knowing what you’re looking at really does take away from the experience and there’s not even a leaflet to tell you what’s what. Indeed, most visitors wouldn’t even know that 2018 marks the 10th anniversary of the Earl’s Garden opening. Surely, such a milestone deserves to be celebrated with something special.
It’s the same story with the castle itself, which this year celebrates its 950th anniversary. Now that’s something you’d think would be cause for a huge celebration. Yet, there’s nothing. No special identity, not even a mention in the visitor leaflet. To me, that’s a huge missed opportunity.
Earlier this month the Standard named the Earl’s Garden as one of the 15 most beautiful in the world. In fact it came in at No 10 and was second only to Kew of all gardens in the UK and just two places off Holland’s Keukenhof Gardens, home to the most spectacular tulip festival in the world.
Despite such accolades, the Earl’s Garden remains Arundel’s best kept secret. I’ve no doubt many visiting the castle leave without even knowing its existence. Indeed, I spoke with one woman whilst I was there who was visiting for the first time. She actually lived in Arundel, yet only recently learnt about the garden!
The Tulip Festival is unquestionably the best time to visit the garden, but it’s all over within a couple of weeks. Of course, when it begins and ends is entirely weather dependant and whilst that makes it challenging to promote, you’d think it would attract huge numbers of visitors and bring in enormous extra revenue for the castle. I doubt however it does either.
So what were my other highlights? Well, as I said, for me it was pretty much deja vu all over again. I did like the mass planting of tulips in the wild flower garden. Apparently, there were around 8,000 blooms there. What made it however was the colour palette of reds, pinks and deep purple.
And as last year, I really like the groups of single species planted in large urns.
Of all the varieties, three stood out most.
First was La Belle Epoque, an unusual coffee mousse colour, flushed with apricot pink, this was one of just three new varieties planted this year.
I was also drawn to a very unusual green and pink variety, which I think is called Groenland. A member of the viridiflora tulips group, it has soft green feathering on dusky rose curved petals.
Viridiflora tulips get their name from the Latin for green (viridi) and were originally found in Turkestan, now a region in Central Asia early in the 17th century.
In complete contrast, another that caught my eye was a fabulous golden yellow and blood red tulip which I believe is Bright Parrot. I particularly liked the fiery way the two colours merged. It really looked liked someone had used a paintbrush!
Just as it was last year, the most striking display was the Labyrinth, which featured 14,000 red Apeldoorn and Ile de France tulips.
And as I say each year, it’s hard to capture the Labyrinth in a single image as you really need to shoot looking down on it. Not only that, it’s surrounded by a rather ugly rope.
A feast for the eyes, there’s no doubt that Arundel Castle’s Tulip Festival is one of the very best floral displays you’ll see outside of a RHS Flower Show such as Chelsea or Hampton Court Palace, but just like both those events it could be so much better.
I’d like to see more creative planting using different colour combinations. For example, I can imagine the American Ground — the area adjacent the Earl’s Garden, featuring several large sculptural displays. So as to not stretch the castle’s gardening team, guest garden designer could be invited to create these each year.
And to ensure that castle visitors don’t miss the tulips in the Earl’s Garden, the path from the main entrance to the garden should also be lined with blooms.
Aside from better promotion and more attention to the visitor experience, perhaps what the festival needs most is a different theme each year. That way, returning visitors will get to see something completely new, rather than more of the same.
Behind the image: All these images were shot handheld with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 and the 75 1.8 lens. Having photographed the Tulip Festival twice before and the garden numerous times, I was keen to come away with a set of fresh images. That’s not easy when much of what’s in front of you looks pretty much the same. My main strategy was to find compositions where something in the foreground was blurred and the tulips in the rest of the frame were in sharp focus. It’s a look I really like and use whenever the opportunity presents itself. The experience of shooting the festival before meant challenging myself not to repeat images I’d already taken and to look for completely new compositions. At the same time, I wanted the images to be clearly mine in their style, something I think I managed to pull off. Shot in Arundel on 24 April 2018.
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Shot! The 2017 Arundel Castle Tulip Festival
Shot! The 2016 Arundel Castle Tulip Festival
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