Shot! The 2019 Arundel Castle Tulip Festival
Now in its fourth year, Britain’s biggest tulip festival was a kaleidoscope of colour and ablaze with beautiful blooms
Some of my best floral images have been taken at Arundel Castle’s annual tulip festival. Tulips have always been one of my favourite flowers to photograph and there’s always been a lot of scope to shoot them creatively in the castle grounds.
Each year, the garden team seem to plant more bulbs than before — some 60,000 — making it almost certainly Britain’s biggest tulip festival.
At Hever Castle in Kent, for example, their tulip event features around 30,000 bulbs and more tulip festivals are popping up each year.
But tulips are unpredictable, so precisely when the blooms will be at their best is a moveable feast.
Catch them either side of the right few days and you’ll miss seeing them in their pomp, as the BBC Breakfast’s Weather team did when they broadcast from Arundel Castle’s Earl’s Garden on April 8th when most of the blooms were yet to show their colours.
With a heads up from the castle’s award-winning head gardener Martin Duncan that they were blooming early this year, I headed to the West Sussex home of the Duke of Norfolk on April 19th, a blazing Easter Friday. Being that it was a bank holiday, I wasn’t alone — there were huge queues waiting to get in. It was, quite literally, tulipmania!
Without doubt, the most Instagrammable feature of the festival is the 17th century-style Labyrinth, a swirling mass of tulips that is also the biggest and most creative planting in the castle gardens.
Now in its third year, the original design was a lot more simple, consisting only of several curved tulip borders set in a large square lawn.
In 2017, it became the Labyrinth when it was planted with circular rows of red tulips, something repeated, if not exactly, then almost exactly in 2018.
This year, whilst the same pattern was retained, its appearance was quite different as white was introduced among the 20,000 red Apeldoorn tulips in the Labyrinth. But these weren’t white tulips, they were Narcissus Thalia, an all-white daffodil. What’s more, it looked as if the daffs outnumbered the tulips.
Now I’m still undecided if daffodils have any place in a tulip festival, especially as there are white tulips. I’m also not so sure this year’s Labyrinth was as well delineated as the previous two all-red versions.
But one thing remained the same: the Labyrinth is still hard to shoot given there are no vantage points from which to get anything like a top shot looking down on the display.
Elsewhere in the walled Earl’s Garden, if I’m honest, things were a tad disappointing. That’s not to say there wasn’t an abundance of tulips in bloom— apparently, some 140 different varieties were planted. It was just having been spoiled the previous two years, I didn’t feel the displays were quite as eye-catching.
In particular, the wild meadow area that previously was a riot of massed varieties was left fallow this year (to prevent tulip fire aka botrytis blight) and, outside of the Earl’s Garden, where I was expecting carpets of naturalistic planting under the ancient cork tree and on the grass banks, there were surprisingly few tulips. In their place were lots of white daffodils.
I always think tulips look best when vibrant colours of different varieties are planted amongst each other.
This was the case in the so-called Bow Tie beds where a kaleidoscope of tropical colours contrasted superbly with the formal lines of the box hedging.
Beyond the Labyrinth, the most iconic shots are found outside the Earl’s Garden, in particular where red tulips are in bloom in front of the castle’s grey ramparts.
Right now, there’s no doubting Arundel Castle puts on the country’s biggest and best tulip festival. But as good as it was this year, this time round I felt it fell a little short.
Looking ahead, I’d like to see less of the same and more of the new. Take the Labyrinth: why not switch up the design and plant some different colours in a new pattern? What about a multicoloured display where one hue merges into another?
But the biggest creative opportunity surely lies outside the walls of the Earl’s Garden where there is a lot more space available. The expansive grass verges cry out for some intricate, large-scale floral designs. Having an annual theme might also help, as it would give a cohesion to the displays.
And, as I say every year, finding a way of labelling the tulips, either physically, with a leaflet or through an app would really enhance the visitor experience.
Instead of just admiring the blooms, you could be informed about what variety you were looking at. If there are 140 to see, you could mark them off as you saw them.
Last, but not least, the hard work put into the festival surely deserves way better promotion than it gets. Why there is no proper marketing for it, or even a dedicated section in the castle’s website, remains a mystery.
That’s not to say the garden team lack ambition, as work is underway on a brand new water garden feature at the opposite end of the castle grounds. It’s due to open in 2020. Judging by how what was once the staff car park was transformed into the stunning Earl’s Garden, one can anticipate it too being something pretty special.
I just hope next year’s tulip festival also breaks new ground.
Behind the image: All these images were shot handheld with the Olympus OM-D E-M1 using the 75mm 1.8 lens. My two biggest challenges were the sun — I much prefer shooting flowers when there’s sun, but during my visit, the sunshine was abnormally bright for the time of year. What’s more, being a warm bank holiday, the castle gardens were packed, making it hard to get shots without people in them or their shadows being cast over the scene. Despite the challenges I have to say I’m really pleased with the compositions I got. Creatively, I was keen to come away with a dozen or so eye-catching shots that were different from the previous three years. Specifically, my eye was drawn to composititions with a graphic feel: an interesting angle or pleasing shape. Overall, I think I succeeded, although finding those differences took some doing. Shot in Arundel on 19 April 2019.
Shot! The 2018 Arundel Castle Tulip Festival https://link.medium.com/tPn0uaQSiW
Shot! The 2017 Arundel Castle Tulip Festival https://link.medium.com/BWpiRVaTiW
Shot! The 2016 Arundel Castle Tulip Festival https://link.medium.com/EbSwnxATiW
