Growing Bulbs in Home Gardens
and Indoors
Find inspiration and ideas, learn bulb basics, and plan your plantings to beautify your yard while making their care quick and easy.
We’ll show some examples of using bulbs indoors and in the landscape. You’ll find other examples of bulbs in gardens by looking online, in periodicals, and in books.
First, let’s start with the basics: What, exactly, are these special flowering plants we call bulbs?
Getting Started with Bulbs
Most plants called bulbs are one of five major categories of bulbous plants: true bulbs, corms, rhizomes, tubers, or tuberous roots.
A few “bulbs” are actually pseudobulbs—rooted plants that mimic true bulbs or tubers—by producing foliage and flowers, then going dormant to survive long dry spells, and reviving when rains renew their growth.
Learn more about these differences so you can recognize each type of bulb and plant them to your advantage [see: Bulb Basics].
Another way of looking at bulbs is to separate them by their season of bloom. Many prefer to refer to “spring bulbs,” “summer bulbs,” and “autumn” or “winter” bulbs. It’s a good way to help choose bulbs and plan for seasonal color in your yard [see: Bulbs and Seasons of Bloom].
Home gardeners plant bulbs outdoors, of course [see: Flowers in Home Landscapes]. It’s not, however, their only use.
These wonderful plants also make great houseplants and you’ll find many ways to trick them into producing showy blooms at any time of the year to beautify your home [see: Bulbs Indoors and Forcing Bulbs].
To help you in your plans, we’ll also provide some useful tips about various regions of the United States and when you should plant your bulbs [see: Regional Tips for Bulbs].
Inspired by Bulbs
Outdoors in the landscape, bulbs typically provide four different design options for home gardens:
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- Formal Plantings
- Informal Plantings
- Natural and “Naturalized” Plantings
- Bed and Border Plantings
- Mixed Plantings
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Indoors, there’s three ways bulbs brighten homes:
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- Bulbs in Containers
- Forced Bulb Blooms
- Bulbs as Foliage Houseplants
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Whether to choose a formal or informal planting style is a matter of choice for each individual. The decision involves matching bulb plantings to overall design and decor choices used throughout the yard and home.
At the opposite end of the scale are naturalized bulb plantings that mimic in our mind’s eye how a natural setting might appear: a clump of flowers here, a solo plant there, turf with bulbs flowering through the green grass, or a field of spring bulbs blooming beneath trees just coming into leaf.
Some gardeners prefer to mass their bulbs in beds or borders, while others like to mix bulbs, annual and perennial flowers, shrubs, and trees.
Gain inspiration and learn more about all your bulb-planting options by exploring these links: