I have a particular liking for tulips. I haven't counted, but I think they will be the most frequently depicted flower on this blog. The Lincolnshire town of Spalding, and the area around it, has a long association with this flower. For many decades it has been grown in the locality both for the blooms and the bulbs, both of which are grown to be sold.
The now defunct Spalding Flower Parade featured hundreds of thousand of tulip blooms on imaginatively designed floats, and the event drew many people to the town to witness the spectacle. The other day we were in Spalding and had a look at Springfields Gardens, the area that sits alongside the purpose-built shopping centre and which makes shopping there bearable (for me anyway)!
We came across sunlit flower beds that featured a great variety of tulips and smaller numbers of other spring bulbs. This didn't surprise us. What did amaze us, however, was the sight that greeted us when we walked through the adjacent area of woodland. Large drifts of tulips had been planted there and were showing off beautifully in the dappled sunlight. It was most unusual to find this variety of flower growing in this kind of location, but it worked wonderfully well and I wondered why it wasn't done more often. The plants had managed to grow and bloom because they reached maturity before the leaf canopy was fully open and had begun restricting the amount of light that reached the ground beneath the branches - in much the same way that wild bluebells and ramsons manage to flower in this kind of setting.
photograph and text © Tony Boughen
Photo 1
Camera: Canon 5D2
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 105mm
F No: f4
Shutter Speed: 1/320 sec
ISO:100
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On
