Arundel Castle's head gardener hails 2024 Tulip Festival success

Transcript

00:00I'm Martin Duncan. I'm the Head Gardener and Landscape Designer at Arundel Castle.

00:04The Tulip Festival has been fabulous. We've had huge turnouts with,

00:09you know, on the weekends up to 3,000 people a day and people absolutely loving it. And then

00:16even during the week we've been having record numbers of sort of 1,500 people, you know,

00:22to 2,000 on a Friday. But what's the joy about the Tulip Festival? It just brings so many smiles

00:28to people's faces and it's such a joy in the springtime to have that colour. You've been

00:35through that winter and then you can just enjoy over 120 different varieties of tulips we have,

00:42or named tulips, you know, from Black Parrot to Golden Apple Dawn and, you know, it's fabulous.

00:49It just looks stunning. I've got such a good team and I even bring in my tree surgeons to

00:55plant the higher banks because we have tulips going up the banks. And, I mean, I plan it now.

01:02I actually start now. So I'll be ordering 120,000 tulip bulbs already for next year. So I do it

01:10early so I know I will get the best choice of tulips. And when they deliver from Holland,

01:17the tulips, they actually come on a big truck and we literally take tractor loads up and down,

01:24up and down, and it takes us about two hours to unload all the tulips. But this year we're going

01:31to revamp our labyrinth of tulips, which is going to be fantastic. So over 24,000 new tulips will go

01:40into the labyrinth and it was the first ever labyrinth of tulips in the world. I know that

01:45because I checked on Google.