Bulbs can be just as permanent as our herbaceous plants, as most will increase year on year adding more and more colour over time. Rock garden bulbs are where that is truest and where it costs least. A pound spent on aconites in September is worth more in five years than the same pound spent on almost anything else in the garden, provided they go somewhere that suits them.
What Is A Bulb Border
It is a border planted for bulbs first and everything else second, and it is the least used good idea in British gardening. Most people scatter bulbs into the gaps between shrubs and herbaceous plants, which works perfectly well, but it means the bulbs are always the guest rather than the point of the thing.
The case for it is that bulbs ask almost nothing of you. Many bulbs can be planted in the partial shade of trees and in cold northerly positions where few other plants will thrive, they want no staking, no dividing for years at a time, and nothing whatever done to them between June and September. A bulb border is the cheapest square metre in a garden to keep.
How Do You Make A Drift Look Natural
Not formally, is the short answer. When planting a bulb border I try not to plant too formally, but plant in drifts or clumps trying to achieve a natural effect. The mistake nearly everybody makes is spacing, because a drift that reads as natural is dense in the middle and thins towards its edges rather than being spread evenly across the whole area.
There is a trick here worth borrowing. To stick with your plan it is useful to mark the areas for planting with lines of sand. Pour the shape out on the soil before a single bulb goes in, walk round it, look at it from the window you will actually be seeing it from, and change it while changing it is still free.
Height is the other half of it. As a general rule taller varieties are planted at the back slowly graduating to the shorter varieties at the front, but do not be too rigid about it, because taller plants placed strategically towards the front or middle help draw the eye and add depth, especially when the border is seen from different angles. One tall thing out of place is worth more than a perfect gradient.
How Deep Do Rock Garden Bulbs Go
Two to three times the height of the bulb, and pointed end upwards. That is the rule for very nearly every small bulb in this range, and where a bulb is so small or so irregular that you genuinely cannot tell which end is which, lay it on its side and let it sort itself out.
Depth matters more at this size than people expect. Too shallow and a small bulb dries out in its first summer or gets turned up by a blackbird, too deep and it may not have the reserves to reach the surface at all. With something knobbly like a corydalis tuber or an anemone corm, err on the shallow side, which is the opposite of the advice for daffodils.
Can You Plant Rock Garden Bulbs In Grass
Yes, and for several of them that is where they look their best. The method is to roll back a turf, add a layer of loam compost, place the bulbs, then replace the turf and tread it down to remove any air pockets. Doing it turf by turf rather than bulb by bulb is far quicker and gives a much more natural result.
Throw them rather than place them. Take a handful, scatter it across the area, then plant each bulb wherever it happened to land, resisting the urge to improve on the pattern as you go, because the hand is better at randomness than the eye is. Anything that looks deliberate in grass looks wrong.
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When Can You Mow Grass With Bulbs In It
Not for six weeks after the last flower has gone over. The leaves are building next year’s bulb the whole time they stay green, and mowing them off in April to tidy the lawn is the commonest single reason naturalised bulbs quietly fade away. Six weeks is the minimum and longer does no harm at all.
This is the real cost of bulbs in a lawn and it is worth saying plainly. Crocus keeps a lawn shaggy until late May and daffodils keep it shaggy into June, which is two months of a garden looking half finished in exchange for three weeks of flower. Where that would irritate you, use rough grass under a tree or along a boundary instead. Nobody expects stripes there.
Which Small Bulbs Actually Spread
Some are generous and some simply are not, and it is worth knowing which before you buy. Once established the willing ones will happily self seed to carpet the ground around them, and the difference across ten years between a bulb that seeds and one that does not is the difference between a drift and a memory.
That generosity holds for the winter aconites, for chionodoxa and scilla, for anemone blanda, and for camassia and puschkinia. It does not hold for eremurus, for hermodactylus, or for the crown imperial fritillaries, which stay in the clump you put them in and get slowly fatter instead. Neither habit is better. It decides how many you buy.
The first thing to flower and the freest to seed itself about.
Pink rather than the usual blue, and it thickens without asking.
The deepest blue of the lot, and it will carpet in time.
Why Do Small Bulbs Disappear
Usually one of four things, and only one of them is your fault. Mice and squirrels take newly planted corms, mowing too early starves them, planting too shallow lets them dry out, and a few are genuinely short lived anywhere the summer soil stays wet.
For the first of those, wire or netting over the area for the first few weeks after planting is what works, because it is the freshly disturbed soil that advertises what you have just done. For the rest, plant deeper than feels right, leave the leaves alone, and choose the species rather than a large flowered hybrid wherever a spot is difficult.
Will Rock Garden Bulbs Grow In Shade
Many will, and a few of them positively prefer it. Many bulbs can be planted in the partial shade of trees and in cold northerly positions where few other plants will thrive, which is the strongest argument there is for the small ones, because they do their entire year before the tree above them is properly in leaf.
Dry shade is the exception. Under a mature conifer, or against a wall with a deep overhang, almost nothing bulbous is happy, and the trouble there is not the light but the moisture. Cyclamen hederifolium and arum italicum are the two that will put up with it.
What Flowers When
The season runs from January into May and it runs in a fairly dependable order. Aconites and the first crocus open in January and February, chionodoxa, scilla, puschkinia and anemone blanda come through March, erythronium and corydalis follow in April, and camassia, ornithogalum and triteleia carry it on into May and June.
Plant for the gaps rather than for the peak. Almost every garden has plenty in April and nothing whatever in February, so if you are buying one thing this autumn buy the earliest one, because a flower in the first week of February is worth five in the third week of April.
March, pale blue, and happy in grass.
April, yellow, and best in the shade of a shrub.
June, violet, and the one that carries the season out.
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What To Plant Them With
Something that comes up as they go over. The small bulbs have finished by the time the herbaceous plants get properly going, so hostas, ferns, hardy geraniums and epimediums all earn their place by covering the ground at exactly the moment the bulbs retreat into it.
Among our own the pairings that work hardest are the ones that stretch the season at either end. Dwarf iris and crocus open before almost anything on this page, dwarf narcissi and species tulips come through at the same low height in March and April, and muscari fills in underneath the lot of them.
Then something to take over in May. Camassia and alliums both stand a good deal taller than anything else here, both come into flower as the small bulbs are going under, and both want the same ground, so a single autumn of planting covers February through to June with nothing missing in between.
Under deciduous shrubs is the other answer, and the better one. A drift there gets full light in February and full shade in July, which is precisely what most small bulbs want, and it makes use of ground that is doing nothing else at that time of year.