Two bulbs in the same square foot of ground are not fighting over it. They are using it at different depths, and if you have chosen them properly, at different moments as well. That is the whole idea behind a combination planting, and it is the cheapest way there is to double what one pot or one patch of border gives you.
What Is A Combination Planting
Two or more bulbs planted together so that they either open at the same time or one straight after the other. Those are the two kinds and they do quite different jobs. Flowering together gives you a colour effect no single variety can produce on its own. Flowering one after the other gives you a far longer season from exactly the same ground.
The combinations in our own range came from a cousin of ours who has spent as many years planting at Keukenhof as we have spent showing at Chelsea. He calls them adventurous, which is fair. The pairings are continental rather than English, bolder than most of us would arrive at unaided, and that is precisely why they are worth having as a starting point rather than as a rule.
Three flowering one after another, which is the succession kind.
Two layers, a fringed tulip over deep blue, out together.
A tulip rising through a haze of anemone, all in the same weeks.
How Do You Layer Bulbs In A Pot
Biggest and deepest first. Tulips or daffodils go in at about 15cm, then a shorter tier on top of them, then the small bulbs an inch or so under the surface, with compost between each layer so that nothing is resting on anything else. Firm each one down gently before the next goes in.
Most attempts come apart on the pot rather than on the planting. Three tiers need real room, and a shallow bowl forced to take them ends up with its bottom layer sitting on almost nothing. Buy the container for the deepest bulb in the plan. Not the other way round.
Will The Bottom Layer Grow Through The Top One
It does, and without any help from you. A shoot pushing up from 15cm meets an obstruction, works its way round it and carries on, which is the reason layered plantings work at all rather than being a clever idea that fails in practice.
The one thing worth avoiding is setting a bulb directly on top of another. Offset each layer so that no bulb sits immediately above the one below it. That takes a few seconds and removes the only real risk in the whole method.
How Many Bulbs Fit In One Pot
More than you would ever put in the ground, and they should not touch. In a border you space bulbs so a clump can build over several years. In a pot you are buying a single season, so set them a finger width apart and get the display you actually paid for.
Be bold about the numbers. Almost every disappointing container is an underfilled one, and the gap between a pot that looks thin and a pot that stops people on the path is usually a dozen more bulbs rather than a different variety.
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How Do You Make Two Bulbs Flower Together
By matching the flowering times before you buy rather than hoping afterwards. Every variety we sell carries its flowering months, and two things listed for the same weeks will open together in most seasons and overlap in the rest.
Height matters as much as timing. Two plants that flower on the same day at the same height will simply hide one another, so a pairing wants a clear difference in stature: something at 40cm standing over something at 15cm, not two things at 30cm.
How Do You Make One Display Last Longer
By choosing consecutively instead of simultaneously. One pot can carry a dwarf iris in February, a small narcissus in March and a tulip in April, and be worth looking at for ten weeks rather than a fortnight.
Let the later one cover for the earlier one. A tulip coming up through an iris that is going over does the tidying for you, and that is the whole difference between a succession that looks planned and one that looks neglected.
Why Does Keukenhof Use So Many Hyacinths
Because they hold a planting together in a way nothing else quite manages, and we use far fewer of them here than the Dutch do. Anyone who has walked round Keukenhof notices it: hyacinths threaded through everything, doing the work of a low hedge at ankle height and scenting the whole path.
We think they are badly underused in British gardens, and the reason is almost always indoors. A forced bowl in a warm room can be overpowering, and people carry that memory out into the garden with them. In open air the same scent is nothing like as strong and is one of the best things in a spring garden.
How Many Varieties Should You Put Together
Two or three, chosen to work with each other. Our own preference is a small number of varieties that suit one another in colour and in flowering time, planted in clumps or drifts, rather than a broad mixture spread evenly about. The mixture has its place where you want a meadow effect. It is the wrong tool for a planting meant to be looked at from a particular window.
Now and then nature hands you the answer. La Symphony is made up of sports of a single tulip, so every variety in it stands at the same height and opens in the same week, and the oranges, yellows and reds blend in a way that would be very difficult to design from scratch.
Three named things rather than a mixture.
All sports of one tulip, so height and timing match exactly.
A pair chosen for height as much as for colour.
Do Combinations Work In Borders As Well As Pots
They do, and a border lets you be far more generous about it. There is no pot wall to work within, so a drift of something inexpensive can run right through a group of something costly and make more of it than either would manage alone.
It is also the most economical thing you can do with a bulb order. Many of the cheaper bulbs planted in large drifts will flatter their more expensive hybrid cousins, and the drift costs a fraction of what the same area of named tulips would. Add a genus you have not grown before while you are at it.
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What To Plant Together
Start with the three tiers and fill them. Tulips at the top, dwarf narcissi in the middle, muscari underneath, and you have the shape of very nearly every good combination in one pot.
Hyacinths are what to add when you want the planting to smell of something, and they are stiff enough to hold the middle of a group together. Earlier still, dwarf iris and crocus will have come and gone before the tulips are properly out of the ground, which is how a container starts working in February rather than April.
For the lightest touch of all, anemone blanda and chionodoxa. Both do the muscari job in a paler blue and a looser shape, and both are happier in a border than in a pot because they want room to seed themselves about.
