Could you give me some suggestions for planting fall bulbs so they have their best impact in the landscape?
There are many ways to use bulbs effectively in the landscape. To begin with, they look best if planted in clusters of at least eight bulbs of the same kind. Avoid planting in rows. Different bulbs can be planted together. I like to plant some early and late blooming ones together to give a longer blooming period.
Bulbs can be combined with other flowers to give a longer season of color. They can be planted in annual flower beds as soon as frost kills them or freezes the flowers. Then as the bulb flowers start to fade next spring, you can plant new annual flowers between the bulbs.
Bulbs can also be planted among perennial flowers, especially those which are slow to develop in the spring. I have even planted them between perennials that grow until they touch each other. There is plenty of room between plants in early spring for bulbs to bloom before the perennials have grown to full size.
I had a neighbor who had a very attractive bulb bed in a cluster of birch trees. She planted both early and late flowering bulbs throughout the area. Crocus, snowdrops and scilla were the first wave of bloom. They were followed by several kinds of daffodils. Then tulips and grape hyacinths bloomed in the middle of spring. A few perennial flowers were scattered in this area to continue the color into summer.
I like to combine bulbs with ground covers. Bulbs will come up quite well through ground covers. I have planted bulbs in ajuga, creeping potentilla, veronica and sedum. If ground covers are recently planted, there is space between plants. It is also all right to dig 2-inch holes in ground cover to plant bulbs. Plants will quickly grow over small holes.
Bulbs will even come up through grass. This is done most in informal, low maintenance landscape situations where grass is allowed to grow with infrequent mowing. Bulbs (especially daffodils) will come up through grass and bloom. However, if bulb leaves are cut off too soon after bloom, they will not have time to make and store food for next year’s bulbs. They need at least four weeks growth after bloom to do this.
In newer landscape plantings where shrubs are still small, there is room to plant bulbs in between. Later, when shrubs have grown larger, bulbs can be moved to a different location.
New beds for bulbs can be created in front of shrubs by removing a 3-foot or wider strip of grass. This is a good situation to plant annual flowers between the fading bulbs as mentioned above.
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