Sarah Raven Giveaway & How to Arrange Hand-Picked Tulips
Nancy M.T.
Our Spring and Summer collections have bloomed, including new Tulips, Red Poppies, Foxgloves, Blossom and more. Read on for Sarah's tips on how to arrange your favourite garden pickings at home.
This recipe was first created for Tulips however you can also give this a go when planning combinations for your garden pots and borders!
Sarah's Recipe for Lovely Tulip Arrangements
Sarah Raven is a writer, gardener and cook, and runssarahraven.com with everything you need for a beautiful and productive garden. Here she shares a wonderful recipe for how to pick and arrange springtime blooms.
“This recipe works brilliantly with tulips and is very easy to try for yourself to create a gorgeous hand tied bunch of flowers. That’s how much of my time is spent in April: experimenting with different tulip arrangements and working out what I love best in colour as well as form.”
Tulips are one of the greatest and cheeriest of flowers and I aim to pick a bunch of tulips every few days to enjoy inside. They are pivotal to Perch Hill, my garden, and we have them everywhere. Mixed in with the roses, scattered through our veg beds and brilliantly coloured like boiled sweets in The Oast Garden, enough to raise anyone’s spirits.
What I always do, whether it’s for the vase or a pot, is I choose three ingredients: a ‘bride’, ‘bridesmaid’ and a ‘gate crasher’.
I’m using my Venetian Tulip Collection here as a guide. This is an absolute Sarah Raven classic. We have been selling it now for over 15 years and I adore the beautiful mix of colours.
Bride
First of all, I pick the thing that I totally fall in love with that morning in the garden, the most showy flower of them all, and here that’s the supremely elegant scarlet-crimson Tulip ‘Couleur Cardinal’. That’s what I call my ‘bride’. If you are choosing flowers from a shop, use the same principle!
Bridesmaid
Then I always know what my next colour is because it’s in the same colour palette, and that’s what I call my ‘bridesmaid’. Beautiful subtle orange Tulip ‘Prinses Irene’, with sunset colours on the outer petals, is ideal. The ‘bridesmaid’ backs up the ‘bride’ and doesn’t compete with her, so you’ve got a similar colour but not quite so showy.
Gate crasher
Finally I’ve got what I call my ‘gatecrasher’, a colour contrast to liven things up, a bit like a gatecrasher at a wedding party. Here it’s the silk satin, almost black Tulip ‘Havran’, also slightly taller than the other two so gives a contrast of form as well as colour. I think it just works perfectly.
Foliage
These tulips all have a beautiful, sort of verdigris, coppery colouring of their leaves. This forms the most perfect sea of silvery green below the flowers and looks wonderful in a hand tied bunch. Remember to strip the bottom leaves before putting them into the vase. Otherwise, the leaves will rot in the vase water and shorten the vase life.
You can also give this recipe a go when planning combinations for your garden pots and borders and have a look at some of our other collections too. We have lots for spring and summer with all the best long-flowering varieties, carefully combined for colour, scent and shape.
Some have been put together for splashes of intense colour and beauty in your borders and pots, others are designed to give buckets of cut flowers. We have collections for containers and for shady corners, or to attract pollinators into the garden. They have been chosen by me, after extensive trialling and testing at my garden, Perch Hill, in Sussex, and I truly love them all.’
Tulips flower through March and April, having been planted as bulbs in the autumn. Sarah’s range of tulips is available to pre-order now for delivery at the right time for planting in September. Her range of summer flowering plants for pots, borders and to cut for the house are all available for delivery now.
To get 20% off Sarah’s entire range visit sarahraven.com and quote discount code EB22PX upon checkout.
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