Some Design Ideas When Planning Your Bulb Plantings

Suggestions for using specific bulbs in a garden design.


Item # 99892 		Spring Flowering Groundcover Sampler for Bulbs

Sampler $77.35
  • Topics: Bulbs, Garden Design
  • Author: David Salman
  • Keywords: design, bulbs, planting, fall, Bulbs
  • Date: September 2001

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Before planning your new bulb plantings, be sure to consider their blooming times. If you want a big explosion of color, mass different types and colors of bulbs with the same early, mid or late spring bloom times. To create a long blooming area of bulbs in the garden, combine different varieties with different bloom times. In this way when one bulb goes out of bloom, another comes into color to replace it.

As in the perennial border, be sure to plant the tallest bulbs in the back of the bed and the shortest in the front. Bulbs make ideal companions for early and mid-spring blooming perennials too. The groundcover Speedwells (Veronica species Turkish Speedwell & Thyme-leaf Speedwell) provide a blue carpet into which bulbs can be planted.

A similar situation can be created using early pink blooming groundcovers like Thymus ‘Pink Chintz’. Crocus, wildflower Iris, miniature and wildflower Daffodils and wildflower Tulips are excellent choices to plant into these groundcovers. Look at our Spring Flowering Groundcover Sampler for Bulbs for more ideas.

Symphytum grandiflora ‘Hidcote Blue’ provides a wonderful nodding blue bell to contrast with the various Daffodils. For example, the tall garden Daffodil ‘Fortissimo; can be used in back of Symphytum, while the miniature Fragrant Wild Daffodil can be used in front. Iberis ‘Little Gem’ makes a bed of white through which blue Muscaria will grow and bloom. Alyssum montanum ‘Creeping Basket-of-Gold’ can be planted in front of Tulipa Fosteriana ‘Pink Emperor’ for a splash of golden yellow and pink. Viola corsica, with its rich violet flowers that come into bloom in mid-spring, is superb with daffodils poking up through them.

All of the Allium ‘Ornamental Onions’ are the last of the fall planted bulbs to flower, coming into color from late spring into early summer. I like to plant Allium sphaerocephalon in among blue Nepeta x faassenii ‘Select Blue’ and sulfur yellow Achillea ‘Moonshine’. The large violet flowers of Purple Sensation are beautiful when blooming amongst the yellow flowers of Aquilegia chrysantha ‘Golden Spur Columbine’. My point is that bulbs shouldn’t be planted only with other bulbs as companion plants. Match bloom times with non-bulb perennials to create an endless number of beautiful, low maintenance combinations.