> Next: Planning for Bulbs
Bulbs in the Home Garden
A Brief History of Bulbs
Turn your garden and your home landscape into a colorful showplace filled with the flowers of blooming bulbs during every season of the year.
Of all the garden flowers, bulbs are perhaps the most magical. They lie in wait, dormant beneath the soil for much of the year, only a promise of the glory that is to come.
Then, as spring awakens their slumber, they burst forth in a blast of color to shake us out of our winter doldrums.
Two thousand years or more before the birth of Christ, anemone, iris, and lily appeared on palace frescoes painted by ancient Minoans at Crete and in tomb paintings of the Egyptians.
Bulbs traveled with the crusaders in the 1500s from the kingdom of Suleiman the Magnificent in Asia Minor to Austria, and then to Holland.
There, collecting rare tulips reached a zenith in the early 1600s. A single prized bulb fetched many years’ salary, but soon a manic market crash demolished entire trade dynasties built on bulbs.
You’ll want to share this passion for bulbs as you discover, choose, plant, and enjoy beautiful bulbs inside your home and outdoors in your landscape. There’s a treasure of unusual and rare bulb species to discover, as well as those that are long-time favorites.
The Promise of Bulbs
Whether spring-, summer-, or autumn-blooming, bulbs are suited for every garden. Besides true bulbs, plants that have corms, rhizomes, tubers, and tuberous roots are grouped loosely together under the broad description we call “bulbs.” [see: Bulb Basics].
You can grow bulbs of every variety in their multitude as container plants, landscape flowers, and in natural gardens. Tender, tropical, and evergreen bulb species are other mainstays in tropical and mild-winter climates.
We typically think of spring landscapes filled with bulbs such as tulips and daffodils. While bulbs are most familiar for their use as landscape color plants, they also can be enjoyed indoors, in massed plantings, or as accents.
Outdoor bulbs are the most popular. Late in autumn, as first frosts begin to brown the grass and leaves turn every shade and hue, gardeners often of spring’s warmth and a new season for sharing the beauty of our home landscapes with our neighbors.
Out of net bags come our carefully saved bulbs, still dormant from their summer’s rest. Raking aside the fallen leaves, we prepare the soil for planting, stopping for a moment to lean on our spade and admire the waning beauty of autumn crocus and cyclamen we planted last spring.
Working the soil until it is loose, we apply fertilizer, mix it in, and cover it with a blanket of fresh soil to separate it from our precious bulbs. Plans and bulbs in hand, we begin to create our magic in patterns hidden beneath the soil.
We bed our hyacinth, squill, and lily-of-the-valley before winter snows fall. By planting tulip, narcissus, and snowdrop into planters and pots, we reaffirm our trust that the cold days now upon us surely will wane and spring will come again.
Planting bulbs is a testament to vision, patience, and reward gained through honest effort. Our payback will be measured in more than a bulb garden filled with glorious blooms or the praise received from those who view it. By trusting the land and placing our love in your plantings, we commit ourselves to caring.