Head Gardener at Arundel Castle Martin Duncan previews some of the newest features as he prepares for the 2025 Tulip Festival.
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00:00My name is Martin Duncan, I'm the Head Gardener and Landscape Designer at Arundel Castle Gardens.
00:05These are some new additions this year, so we have daffodils intermingled with a wide range
00:11of at least five different tulips, so it's going to look stunning, especially with this
00:16beautiful thatched roundhouse, and then this becomes the wildflower garden
00:22after they finish flowering. Here we are in the wonderful new stumpery, and what's wonderful
00:27is you now have this backdrop of the castle, absolutely stunning, and of course these stumps
00:33are so architectural and striking, and we've been preparing this over the whole winter,
00:39and now we're just about to plant it up with pulmonarias, foxgloves, bluebells, a wide range
00:47of absolutely stunning ferns, so it'll be like a fernatum. This is going to be an incredible site,
00:54and as I say, what a wonderful view of the castle. It's wonderful to come into the lovely
01:01rose garden at Arundel Castle. We've got the beautiful rose Adelaide d'Orleans, which covers
01:08this lovely gothic arch, and the reason we've used gothic archways and gothic seating within here
01:15is because if you look at the reflection of the castle windows, they're all gothic, and it just
01:23reflects how using the architecture within the gardens really works. We've also got these sort
01:30of quite tall obelisks in the middle, and what we've done is we've added four new smaller obelisks
01:37on the outside, and of course because they're smaller it makes the garden look bigger,
01:43and then we've added all beautiful new roses like Desnamona. Here is our wonderful new water pond.
01:50It's got lovely seating as we do education for children here, and so they'll come here,
01:57they can dip in the pond, and then look at different insects like water boatmen,
02:03and then they can look at all the beautiful surroundings. We have beehives, we have beautiful
02:10wildfowl, we have things like the brown tufted ducks over there, we also have the coots, we have
02:19more hens, and then this beautiful area here, we even have an island for all the birds, and actually
02:26we actually had a kingfisher here over the last month where I've seen it about four or five times,
02:33and so it's a beautiful place for both visitors and for education for the children. Our first
02:40tulips, salmon impression in flower this year, and then we've got beautiful mysotis and lovely
02:47wallflowers, and just over there we have this incredible wedding cake of tulips with over 3,000
02:55tulips. I have a wonderful team of gardeners and volunteers, and throughout the late autumn
03:02and early winter months we have been planting over 120,000 tulips throughout the landscape and
03:10grounds and gardens, and it's going to look stunning, so we are really excited to see
03:16this year's tulip festival 2025.