OUT OF THE SHADOWS
What better advertisement for Tulipa sprengeri than Amanda and Simon Mehigan’s garden in west Dorset? In dappled shade below an avenue of red oaks, this species tulip blooms scarlet amid a haze of blue forget-me-nots from the end of May and on into June. The latest flowering of all tulips and the only one that grows well in a woodland garden, it spreads itself about with gay abandon when happy. “They love leafmould and seem to cluster around the roots of the trees,” says Amanda. “Ours have done best at the top of the avenue where it’s most shady.”
When the Mehigans bought the Old Rectory in the village of Netherbury in 1994, a dense block of conifers,
