Growing Bulbs in the Natural Garden: Innovative Techniques for Combining Bulbs and Perennials in Every Season Growing Bulbs in the Natural Garden: Innovative Techniques for Combining Bulbs and Perennials in Every Season Hardcover
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From the Publisher
Inspired by Nature’s Design
Growing Bulbs in the Natural Garden provides inspiration and insights using nature as a model. This exquisitely photographed guide offers advice on bulb varieties, planting methods, and handy tools for gardeners working in spaces large and small.
Planning and planting
If you want to do something with bulbs in your own garden or on your balcony, it’s a help to have some sources of inspiration: examples of what they might eventually look like, which could perhaps lead you to change your original plan. This is less true of the bulbs that flower in autumn and winter because there are only a few of them. Then it’s a question of finding the right spot in your garden or place for a container.
Which bulb goes where?
When you start with buIbs, begin by choosing a large quantity of a few species rather than smaller quantities of lots of species. The latter results in too much fragmentation and therefore disorder. And if your first design works out well, you can always add more species later on.
Bulbs in grass
One of the very simplest ways of doing something with bulbs is to plant them in grass, and by that, I mean a neatly trimmed lawn. I planted 800 crocuses in my tiny 15-square-metre lawn a few years ago and it’s a real delight to see them flowering one by one every spring. I made sure that there was a mixture of varieties with different, overlapping flowering times.
How to achieve a nonchalant result
In practice, this means that you mix your chosen species in a wheelbarrow and then scatter groups of a comparable size among your perennials. These plants will have to be cut back as much as possible first, or else you’ll never find some of the bulbs you’ve scattered. This cutting back only has to be done once, because you are planting for the long term with bulbs that will reemerge year after year.
Colour
Colour and colour combinations largely dictate the character of a garden. A completely white garden is magnificent in its simplicity and freshness but also looks austere. A garden in all sorts of different hues can look very cheerful but can also feel chaotic. This is why it’s important, certainly in smaller spaces, to think carefully about the outcome you want and to choose a combination of colours that is calming and balanced and which supports the style you have in mind.
A lot of work?
Every time I design a planting plan, whether it is big or small, I invariably try to promote bulbs as an additional feature. I always start with spring-flowering bulbs, because many people don’t even realise that there are many more groups of bulbs that flower at a different time of year.
Jacqueline van der Kloet
An internationally acclaimed designer, van der Kloet's advice is sought by designers and landscape architects around the world. Her designs are prized for their beauty, naturalized schemes, and bold uses of color.