Bulbs can be fun gardening

So, you want some Spring color in your garden. Mistakes I see people making is depending on the standard Daffodils and Tulips. Yes, they can make a great show, the problem is they aren’t always reliable about coming back. Especially where they get too much summer water.

Most of our bulbs come from dry summer climates. Tulips for instance are native to Turkey and most of the ancestors of the garden daffodil are from the Mediterranean climates from Spain through Turkey. When we water extensively during them summer it allows the bulbs to rot when they are dormant.

There are a number of small flowering species tulips that are much more reliable about increasing. Tulip clusiana is one that I have used at home with good results. I tuck them in spots that don’t get all the water the rest of my garden does in the summer. This picture shows the increase in the second year. The first year there was only one flower in each clump. And I expect even more this next spring.

Tulip clusiana: Picture by Jungle Jim

Snowflakes are the bulb that has been dependable for me for over fifty years. When my parents and I lived on the nursery property 60 years ago we had Snowflake plantings that were probably twenty years old then.  During the last major remodeling we moved a few and the decendents are still blooming every spring.

Last spring I had pictures of a planting of Anemone that I think is over twenty years old in a hybrid bermuda lawn At my old house I had Brodiaea that multiplied from a dozen bulbs to well over a hundred.

In any case in my garden I love to have small groups of some of the smaller bulbs planted where they can surprise me in the Spring.

This is the time to get them in the ground.

---