Martin Duncan spoke to Henry Bryant about the Arundel Castle Tulip Festival for 2025.
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CreativityTranscript
00:00I'm Martin Duncan. I'm the head gardener and landscape designer at Arundel Castle. We are
00:05having the most amazing tulip festival with absolutely beautiful mixes. As you can see from
00:12here, the stunning look of tulip cakes. We've got six different tulip cakes, over 14,000 tulips in
00:20this area alone. And in this mix we have things like Apple Dawn of Beauty, we've got Impression,
00:28Pink Impression, we have Apple Dawn, Purple Prince. We have seven different tulips just in this mix
00:34alone and it looks beautiful. We've just got a cacophony of colours and it's been probably our
00:41best year of having different mixes. So we've got over 140 different named tulips and then put in
00:48the context of different heights, colours, structures, it seems to have worked perfectly. And of course
00:54this dry weather is so good for tulips. It just brings, you know, smiles to people. And literally
01:02over the last three days we've had over 9,000 people visiting and I don't think one of them left
01:09without a big smile on their face. It just brings so much happiness at this time of year. The new
01:15stumpery, which is, we're calling it the classic stumpery, is working out incredibly well. And people
01:22go buy it and wonder what on earth's happening. And of course we've put in over two and a half
01:27thousand plants recently, including tulips you'd find on the hillsides of Turkey, where they originated
01:33from. So it's really interesting. Two and a half thousand plants in, I think I've got to go and buy
01:40another two and a half thousand plants. People come here and they just cannot believe what they see,
01:46because I think we've got one of the most diverse gardens in the country, where you've got
01:51formality, informal, wildflowers, water gardens, rose garden, white garden. And what we're really
01:59excited about is we've been shortlisted for Garden of the Year Award for the Historic Houses Association,
02:08sponsored by Christie. So we're really proud of that because we've been shortlisted from 38 gardens down
02:15to the last eight, and now it's up to the public to vote. So if you do come and you like our gardens,
02:21please vote for us.