Shot! The 2024 Arundel Castle Tulip Festival.
The blooms came unseasonably early, but with a noticeable lack of tulips, this year’s festival fell somewhat short of the visual delights of previous years.
There’s no doubt putting on a tulip festival is an angst-ridden experience. During November and December you need to plant thousands of bulbs, then it’s all about waiting and wondering. Waiting months for the blooms to appear and wondering what effect the vagaries of the British weather will have on when exactly they will be at their best.
Equally challenging, tulips are fugacious flowers, disappearing almost as quickly as their arrive. In order to stretch out the display, you need to select different tulips among the 3,000+ registered varieties that will bloom at different times. According to the RHS, their flowering period from one year to another can be as much as six weeks.
So to ensure there would always be something to see during the three weeks that the festival runs, the castle’s garden team under award-winning head gardener Martin Duncan, planted 75,000 bulbs featuring some 120 different varieties.
On March 18th, the castle were posting photos showing that none of its tulips were in bloom and that they were awaiting to announce the festival start date. The following ten days must have seen a dramatic change in the weather as by the end of the month it was announced that the festival would begin on April 1st, just a few days after the castle reopened following its winter hibernation. (It is shut completely from the beginning of November to the end of March.)
This year, as well as arriving early, the tulips were at their prime for far less time. That meant, to see it at its best, festival goers would need to rely on luck or judgement with regard to the timing of their visit or risk disappointment.
With day after day of inclement weather forecast, I settled on Friday 12th, which was predicted to be both dry and sunny. And so it turned out. As a result, both the town and the castle were palpably busier than usual, with Arundel perhaps drawing additional visitors thanks to its role as the main location for the just released movie Wicked Little Letters. From what I could gather, the word on the street was that all the town’s parking spaces were full.
Talking of parking, the Earl’s Garden which was squeezed into two acres of of the castle’s former staff car park and kitchen garden — was also packed with visitors. But what it wasn’t full of were tulips. Indeed, compared to previous years, there was a distinct lack of them. Chatting with several people, it became clear I was not the only one disappointed by the paucity of the display. No matter where you looked, tulips were pretty thin on the ground.
How do I know? Well, this was the seventh year I’d photographed the festival, excluding the two put paid to by Covid in 2020 and 2021. As a regular visitor I also know the display is largely the same from one year to the next. Last year, despite its centrepiece, the Labyrinth, being planted with 14,000 King’s Blood tulips, the delineation of the spiralling beds was less defined than in past years, which meant it just didn’t look that impressive.
To be honest, it hasn’t looked at its best since 2017 and 2018. And to make matters worse, this year it had no tulips at all. I heard various explanations for why this was, but whatever the reason, it left a massive hole in the festival.
And I have to say the one attempt to do something new was similarly unimpressive. In previous years, the Wild Flower garden was a carpet of mixed tulips. Now, it featured a pair of tiered displays — described as ‘Tulip Cakes’ — each filled with three different varieties on a bed of white narcissi. To my eyes, it was way better before.
The same could be said of another of the garden’s highlights, the Stumpery, which this year was almost bereft of tulips and with it the pops of colour that brings it to life.
Speaking of colour, there were two combinations that stood out for me in the numerous pots positioned around the garden. Perhaps my favourite was the one that contained mixed tulips in fiery shades of orange, pink and red.
The other, inexplicably hidden from most people’s view, was a single pot of Orange Princess tulips beautifully combined with bright blue Muscari.
However — and I appreciate this has everything to do with the timing of your visit — there were far too many tulips on display that were past their prime and many that had gone over. There may be a good reason for leaving them like that, but for me, an abundance of dead flowers does not make a great impression.
One improvement I did like was at the Antler Gate, where the wooden antlers has been freshly gilded. I’m surprised the scallop shell atop the Arun Fountain didn’t receive the same treatment. But again, the display of potted tulips in front were more or less the same as previous years, when there could have been considerably more of them or, for that matter, they could have been in golden not terracotta pots. The new addition of a plaque bearing Shakespeare’s famous “All the world’s a stage” line surely merited a more theatrical display.
The absence of swathes of tulips wasn’t just limited to the Earl’s Garden, but throughout the castle grounds.
Despite the castle’s social media claiming a “landscape abundant with tulips” the only area I found where there was a profusion of blooms was on one of the castle banks, where a carpet of Oxford Red tulips looked splendid against the grey walls. If only this vista had been repeated elsewhere.
Unfortunately, this year’s tulip festival fell some way short of the “breathtaking and magical experience” that Arundel Castle claimed it would be. I can only hope that 2024 was a just a blip and future festival’s will see a return to the visual splendour I’ve witnessed in the past. That being said, just being good is not good enough, and greater ambition is needed to ensure that it not only delights future visitors, but that it remains one of the country’s foremost floral festivals.
Until recently, it was Britain’s biggest tulip festival, but this year after being overtaken by Hampton Court, that title belongs to Tulley’s Farm — ironically also in West Sussex. Tulley’s much talked about inaugural tulip fest is said to feature over 500,000 bulbs! It has to be said they’ve taken a very different — and admittedly, much more commercial — approach to Arundel Castle with their event aiming to replicate the famous tulip fields of Holland, complete with 15 ‘selfie stations’ and Dutch food and drink. Whilst it’s not the same thing, they are appealing to a similar audience. Indeed, several people I chatted to at Arundel Castle told me they were planning to visit Tulley’s.
As beautiful as an individual tulip or a group of them in a terracotta pot may be, it’s only when they are planted en masse that they become a sight to behold. It’s the same with so many other flowers like bluebells, cherry blossom, daffodils, lavender and sunflowers: there needs to be lots of them to create an impressive vista.
Of course, bigger isn’t necessarily better. Take the identifying labels for example. Now I’ve advocated for them numerous times in the past, only to be repeatedly told by the garden team that the Duchess of Norfolk (whose family home Arundel Castle is) dislikes labels of any kind. Well, in 2022 she had a change of heart and hand-written labels made their debut. This year there are so many labels and A-boards that they are now overly intrusive.
I’ll conclude by repeating what I’ve been saying for the past few years. Being that the tulip festival is the highlight of the castle garden’s year, I’d like to see much more ambition when it comes to its displays. Like any event, it cannot rest on its laurels, or in this case, its blooms.
Behind the shot: All these images were taken handheld with the iPhone 14 Pro. As always, it was all about looking for interesting compositions, trying not to take the same pictures as I’ve done in the past and waiting until there were no people in the frame. Photographed at Arundel Castle on 12 April 2024.
My thanks to Martin Duncan for the invite.
About the author: Based in Sussex-by-the-Sea, on England’s south coast, Gary is a creative writer and image-maker. He specialises in creating out of the ordinary portraits of musicians and people with interesting faces, as well as photographing some of the world’s finest flowers and gardens, not forgetting an array of automotive exotica.
On the writing side, he has used his research skills to author deep dives into some noteworthy songs beginning with Bryan Ferry’s ‘These Foolish Things’ ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials, ‘Real Wild Child’ by Ivan and ‘All The Young Dudes’ by Mott the Hoople.
He has also written a biography of Robert Palmer and the stories behind Whitesnake’s blatant Led Zep rip-off, ‘Still Of The Night’, Harry Styles’ anthem to positivity, ‘Treat People With Kindness’ and the little known Queen track ‘Cool Cat.’
Most recently, Gary has penned the fascinating story behind George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ as well as ‘Believe It Or Not’ a look into the rise of fake news.
All these can be found here on Medium, along with his reviews of gigs and events and chats with musicians including the likes of Royal Blood, Joe Satriani and Wolf Alice.
