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Outdoor Bulb Plantings
In This Section
In this section, you’ll find important discussions, explanations, and complete directions of how to plant bulbs in your home’s garden or landscape, including:
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- The best depths to plant specific species of bulbs.
- Step-by-step demonstrations of the seven most popular ways to plant bulbs.
- Discussions of how to choose locations and plant bulbs in home gardens and landscapes.
- “Naturalized” bulbs that look as though they grew in your yard naturally and how to plant them.
- How to mix bulbs and other flower plantings, including annuals, biennials, and perennials or ornamental shrubs and trees.
- Preventing pets and visiting wild animals from damaging your bulb plantings.
On This Page
Here, you’ll find discussions and descriptions of popular ways used to plant bulbs beneath each of the following titles:
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- Getting Started
- Types of Outdoor Bulb Plantings
- Planting Individual Bulbs
- Planting Formal Beds
- Planting Bulbs in Landscapes
- Planting Naturalized Bulbs
- Mixing Bulbs with Other Flowers
Getting Started
Most gardeners follow a design plan for planting bulbs outdoors in landscape beds and borders that they’ve made ready and filled with amended and enriched soil.
Outdoor bulb plantings require some planning and preparation, but they’re easy to master. Consult the pages in this section to learn each of the most popular methods gardeners use to plant most types of bulbs.
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Following a layout plan is the best way to ensure good results when you plant bulbs. Divide the bed into planting areas using string. Once you’ve finished, choose locations in the bed for each bulb color in massed plantings, or each species and color if you’re mixing different bulb varieties.
It’s best to layout the bulbs on the soil in your bed or border, following your plan, before digging holes and planting them. Fill each area in turn, spacing them as recommended [see: Bulbs].
Types of Outdoor Bulb Plantings
Most gardeners and landscapers use bulbs to plant in one or more of the following plans:
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- Individual and Specimen Bulbs
- Bulbs in Formal Beds and Borders
- Bulbs in Landscapes
- Naturalized Bulbs
- Mixed Flower-Bulb Plantings
Take a moment to become familiar with each of these design plans [see also: Bulbs in Home Landscapes].
Planting Individual Bulbs
Planting single specimen bulbs or very small groups of a single species is a great way to provide a color accent in your yard.
Some bulbous plants divide and grow into stunning color displays that are distinctive and beautiful additions to any landscape.
This daylily, one of the Hemerocallis family, is a good example. It makes an ideal single-bulb planting to add a splash of bright summer color in its all-green backdrop of bushes and shrubs.
Planting Formal Beds
Both massed plantings of a single species or color and mixed contrasting and complementary plantings in geometric patterns create striking effects in formal gardens.
Whether in a true formal garden or in a stand-alone island bed that rises from a lawn with glorious blooms, formal bulb plantings are always eye-catching reminders of a home gardener’s planting skills.
This bed, bounded by neatly clipped hedges and turf grass lawns, features white and yellow tulips along with smaller bulb species.
Planting Bulbs in Landscapes
Bulbs used for color on a landscape scale are usually divided into several sections, each with its own planting and plan.
Landscape bulb plantings frequently use height as well as flower color and shape to define their pleasing patterns.
This border is planted in front of a masonry wall. It turns the meeting of lawn and brick into a blaze of color. The color border features layers of different height bulbs. Tall lily-of-the-nile in hues of white and blue tower over a foreground planting of showy hardy begonias of russet red.
Planting Naturalized Bulbs
Naturalizing means planting bulbs informally, making it appear that they grew naturally in a landscape or grassy lawn.
Only naturalize bulbs that you know are hardy in your climate. Avoiding tender bulbs means you’ll avoid finding, lifting and storing scores of bulbs hidden within your landscape.
Many beautiful cultivars also lose vigor in a season or two. Either mark bulbs that require replacements, or match them with crocus, narcissus, and species tulips that are hardy in your area.
Mixing Bulbs with Other Flowers
Mixing bulbs with annuals and perennials—even flowering shrubs—allows the bulbs’ strong colors to shine like highlights in your garden beds, borders, and islands.
Mixed beds also make your landscape colorful over the whole season.
Deep-rooted, drought-tolerant annuals and perennials are the best companions for most spring and summer bulbs. Follow your planting plan to create a shifting display in your garden.
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