Rhubarb Rhubarb

Tulips and lemon cake

Dear Gardener

As you know I LOVE tulips. Tulips are my favourite flower. The planting of them, however, terrifies me. You see, as a virgin gardener, the thought of digging holes in my flower bed is simply scary. I just don't understand how you avoid all the other bulbs and roots in your flower bed. Thanks to you I've got hundreds of bulbs to plant, and I am grateful for them, especially at the promise of a wonderful spring morning with ramrod-straight tulips staring up at a blue sky from their pots. I want to plant them myself but am scared of going wrong. I know I sound idiotic but I just need some planting advice and to know if you think they are better in pots or scattered over the garden. I feel they are more formal than that. Advice? And should we peruse the history of the noble tulip? Do you know the Dutch story in detail, you know how tulips were worth a fortune etc etc...

Best etc

Cook

Dear Cook

Borders and beds, pots and planters - wherever there's a nook. I pack 'em much in the style of the passengers on those buses your mother wrote about.

The most important thing is not to allow tulip bulbs to get soggy. It's common sense if you think about it: look at the bulb and imagine it sitting in our Wealden clay for five months. Disaster. So, if it's been raining for weeks, as it has been for what seems like weeks here, just be patient and wait a while. They won't come to any harm by going in a few weeks late, as long as they have been stored somewhere cool and dry. I confess to planting in January a couple of years ago, just because up till then I couldn't find a nice enough day to go outside. Bulb planters really take the hard work out of the job: and bulb planters with long handles (I reckon devised for the infirm) are actually a stroke of genius - no bending down, no muddy knees and the bulbs get planted to the right depth. As for the other plants, I've been telling you for ever: just plant the bulbs where there aren't plants - it is that simple, I promise you. I know you're worried about existing bulbs, but if you take a photo of them when they're flowering, you'll have a pretty good idea. I know it's a bit of a faff but it will save you the irritation of slicing a happy bulb in two.

Anna Pavord wrote the seminal work on the tulip, called, you guessed it, The Tulip. She described how when it arrived from Turkey, it took Western Europe by storm, and almost drove people crazy in their anguish and desperation to collect prize specimens. You can imagine this: such an exotic, sturdy yet delicate flower, with stems taking their own shape in vases. My favourite combination of the moment is Jimmy, Cairo and Ronaldo: toffee-coloured Cairo seems weird, but when you put it with purple and burgundy and deep red – sumptuous.

However, the best of the best of the best has to be La Belle Epoque – think damask and Colefax and Fowler circa 1983. I promise I’ll remind you in a few months when it’s bulb ordering time.

Are you out in the garden? I tried calling yesterday but I guessed you must be still outside in this fab sunshine celebrating the emergence of your tulip bulbs - your idea of holding a tulip festival certainly is an admirable if somewhat optimistic goal. But I know I'll be laughing on the other side of my face when your bulb display is a local institution in your dotage. Just imagine, you yourself would be an actual institution – you’d love that. You’d be a date in the diary, a High Day or even a Holiday. Hyperbole aside, I think you’d actually be really good at that, as you’re pretty efficient at hosting events in general. I crumble into a heap at the thought of more than three people for lunch, yet while I’m crumbling, you’re probably whipping up an apple crumble and making your table look rather wonderful at the same time. I forgot to tell you I’ve been inspired by your table linen – now there’s a statement I never thought I’d make, but there it is. Walking down the King’s Road (oh still my beating heart, but how I miss the streets of London) the other day, I noticed the little slice of Heaven that is William Yeoward was having a sale, so nipped in and before I knew it, pounds had been spent on eight lilac cotton tablemats which at the time I thought might change my life and inspire to invite seven for supper. But in the cold light of day I realized that it was probably more like a delaying displacement activity – no change there. For as long as I can remember I’ve been putting off trying to give up procrastinating; I sound like a greetings card but it’s true. I find myself wondering how much more I might have achieved if I had, say, actually read the whole of Tess of the d’Urbervilles at A level, rather than just the introduction and Brodie’s notes. The irony is that when I read it for the first time twenty years later, it turned out to be rather a gripping read. But you remember what it was like when we were seventeen – the things people told you to do were the things we definitely weren’t going to do, at any price.

Table settings and sunshine turn my thoughts to Easter. For all my lack of adroitness at making a table look spit-spot, I do get very over-excited at the thought of rusting up a festive decoration or two. (Remember last year when I realised my greatest achievement was the fact that my Halloween decorations actually made small children weep as they walked up the garden path? The life-size animatronic witch was a particular triumph). So I’m rooting out the slightly bedraggled, stick-legged, almost fluff-less tiny yellow chicks, and decorations for the Easter Tree – by the way, what IS that all about? Did you ever have an Easter Tree as a child? In the words of George W Bush, that is some weird ****.

For some reason, as a teenager I always wanted to make a Simnel cake. I remember tearing the annual Easter recipe article out of my mother's Good Housekeeping magazine and planning one day to feed my own family with it, as no one then would touch it. As things have turned out, no-one here will ever touch it either - I have to admit the effect of the whole marzipan/ ball combo isn't really what you'd call mouthwatering. Do you have any ideas for a good Easter-ish teatime cake which people will actually eat? (I know the Labrador will eat it, but that's not the point).

My fridge, by the way, is looking satisfyingly full this morning. I know this in your opinion creates a state of happiness worthy of Snoopy at his most happy.