Celebrating tulip time, making pampass plume and preventing peony problems

This week on Gardener's Corner, host David Maxwell celebrates the vibrant creativity of spring with a deep dive into tulip cultivation, featuring Anna Hudson's stunning display of peony-headed, double, and uniquely streaked varieties. The episode reveals that tulips are far from disposable—many return year after year, even thriving in grass or borders, and their graceful decline is as beautiful as their bloom. The show then shifts to real-life garden transformations: Elizabeth Temple’s 40-year journey turning a featureless walled garden into a thriving, bird-filled sanctuary through gradual planting and no-dig beds, and Dublin’s Taplin’s Fields, a community-led urban garden born from guerrilla gardening that now feeds and unites residents. A rare botanical discovery—glabrous whitlowgrass, first recorded in County Londonderry—highlights how accessible citizen science can be with just a phone and the iRecord app. Practical advice covers everything from coaxing pampas grass to flower after two years of patience, to managing peony blackening (likely frost, not disease), and the importance of not over-mulching peonies. The episode closes with a powerful call to action: Belfast’s potential to become a National Park City, proving that urban spaces can be richer in biodiversity than rural parks—and that every garden, balcony, or patch of soil can be part of a larger ecological movement.