“Duel du Roy” at Sandringham

An old friend of ours has been hanging out with Queen Elizabeth.

“Hey, that looks like ‘Deuil du Roi Albert’,” I said to myself while paging through the October 2017 issue of The English Garden – and sure enough it was, growing at Sandringham, the Queen’s 20,000-acre estate in the Norfolk countryside.

Sandringham, I learned, has been the private home of four generations of British monarchs. It’s where – as fans of the TV show The Crown may recall – Elizabeth’s father loved to hunt and where the royal family spends most Christmases.

Sandringham’s gardens are “peppered with tender exotics and a vibrant display of late summer dahlias” in a “distinctively Edwardian approach” that hearkens back to the first decade of the 20th century when Victorian flamboyance was giving way to the more naturalistic style of the Arts and Crafts movement.

“The same dahlias have been grown at Sandringham for 30 years,” the article explains, “but the names they are known by come from their original labels, which can suffer from ‘gardeners’ spelling’ and slightly idiosyncratic ideas about naming.” That’s certainly true of ‘Deuil du Roi Albert’ – “Mourning for King Albert” – which at Sandringham goes by the much livelier name of ‘Duel du Roy’.

Whatever you call it, ‘Deuil/Duel’ is truly a dahlia fit for a queen, and – although our stock this year is limited – you can order yours now for April delivery.

Have you ever seen a garden with a million tulips? If you visit the spectacular Taean World Tulip Festival in Seoul, you will.

Named one of the world’s top five tulip festivals, the April-May event features 1.2 million tulips of 300 different varieties. And although different kinds of tulips normally bloom at different times over a span of 6-8 weeks, at Taean – thanks to sophisticated horticultural management techniques – they pretty much bloom all together. As they say in Korea, “Wa!”

While most visitors will just be gazing blissfully at the tulips, some very serious flower-lovers will be gathering May 1-3 at the XIII International Symposium on Flower Bulbs and Herbaceous Perennials. Along with presentations ranging from “Evaluation of Hybrid Lilium for the Landscape” to “Breeding of Blue Flowers by Genetic Engineering,” the symposium includes tours of some of Korea’s top nurseries and public gardens.

Enjoy more photos of the festival here, and then start making your travel plans. Spring is already on its way!

Investing a little time in your garden now will pay big dividends in the year ahead, so here’s our seasonal guidance for improving your garden’s health and beauty – and increasing your garden joy:

how to clean up iris and peonies to protect them from borers and mildew,

how to dig and store dahlias, glads, tuberoses, rain lilies, and crocosmias (pictured here, freshly dug),

how to plant tulips, daffodils, etc. in outdoor containers,

how to force bulbs indoors for winter bloom.

For more, check out the 39 other links at our complete Planting and Care page, or call or email us. We want to help!