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Choosing Formal or Informal Gardens
Formal and Natural Bulb Plantings
As you begin your quest for the perfect bulb garden, you’ll have to make several fundamental choices. The first of these is whether your landscape plantings will be formal or informal.
Second, will you devote an entire bed to bulbs, or will you use them selectively in your garden?
The answer to these questions will guide your decisions as you plan the look of your garden, select bulbs, and plant them in your beds.
If you decide to plant a special bulb garden, your project’s scope will be determined by the size the bed, and many other decisions quickly will fall into place.
If, on the other hand, you choose to use bulbs as accents in your landscape—or to place a container or two of bulbs on a deck, balcony, or patio—you’ll want bulbs that coordinate with their surroundings.
The two dominant garden forms are formal and informal—sometimes called natural—landscapes.
Formal gardens stem from landscapes of the Middle Ages, including those found in monasteries, palaces, and cloisters of Europe and the Mideast.
Islamic geometric influences led to gardens designed with repeated, symmetrical elements. These landscaped grounds—now called formal gardens—became popular in France, Italy, and Spain. Then bulbs made their appearance.
Trade with the Far East beginning in the 1700s introduced a competing design concept frequently seen in Asian gardens—symbolic naturalism.
While gardens in this form appear as natural as true wild settings, they actually have underlying design principles based on fluid, sinuous forms, circles, and ovals. These hidden backbone patterns unify their elements.
Over time, naturalism became popular, and today bulb gardens abound with naturalized beds of crocus, daffodil, hyacinth, and tulip planted in drifts along hillsides and beneath tree bowers.
Choosing Bulb Gardens
You may be drawn to either formal beds or those with a more natural appearance. Either way, your landscape should be planted to match your vision.
Gather ideas. Bulb plantings that you admire in another gardener’s yard often contain individual elements that are easily adapted to other landscape settings.
Always keep in mind the size of your site and your choice of style as you seek inspiration in the media or in public gardens, and be encouraged by the endless possibilities. Especially note the use of colors and patterns.
After you have gathered samples, choose your favorites to enhance your garden or use them to trigger new and original ideas.
Planning a formal bed or border requires time spent creating the patterns in which the bulbs will grow and flower.
Naturalized beds are more free-flowing than the formal bed and borders. Curves replace straight lines. The planting area’s edges blend instead of meet. Sinuous forms, including kidney and paisley shapes, create drifts of color.
Though subtle, planned geometric patterns also are part of these informal gardens, and they incorporate many of the same design principles as those found in formal plantings.
For borders, plan to step the size and height of the various plants’ blooms up as you choose bulbs to fill locations in the border from front to back. Each succeeding tier of bulbs should be taller and rise above the blooms in front of them.
Beds are really back-to-back borders, with their tallest plants in the center and shorter species to the edges.