Arundel Castle Tulip festival in full swing

Martin Duncan spoke to Henry Bryant about the Arundel Castle Tulip Festival for 2025.

Transcript

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.