It’s bulb season! Our horticulturists are now in the process of sorting and planting all sorts of future beauties in the Home Gardening Center. But what about you? Got any special plans for your own spring flower beds?

Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen

Sonia Uyterhoeven is the NYBG’s Gardener for Public Education.

Tulipa ‘Spring Green’

As I mentioned the other week, I have been making the Garden rounds to talk to different colleagues about their favorite bulbs. We often like to use tulips here at the NYBG as part of large annual displays in springtime. We plant the bulbs in November, which then flower in May. By June, they have all been dug up and recycled in the compost pile.

The reason why tulips are not often part of permanent displays is that many varieties don’t come up consistently in subsequent years. They look glorious the first year, spotty the second year, and prove fairly anemic moving into the third and fourth years. Happily, this is not true with all tulips, and many make wonderful, long-lived additions in a garden provided they have good drainage.
read more »

Sonia Uyterhoeven is the NYBG‘s Gardener for Public Education, and can often be found hosting gardening demonstrations on Saturdays and Sundays.

Hyacinthus orientalis

Next weekend, I will be teaching visitors to the Home Gardening Center how to properly site, plant and protect their bulbs from hungry critters. It is a demonstration that I enjoy giving every year. We examine a number of bulbs, learn all the basics and then find a few nice empty spots around the Garden to plant. It is one of the demonstrations where I like to get hands-on with visitors, encouraging them to jump in and help prepare a nice display for the spring.

Last week, I made the rounds with a few of the curators and gardeners asking them about their favorite bulbs and planting techniques. The first stop I made was to meet with Jody Payne, the curator of the Rock Garden. I asked her for some good recommendations for the homeowner.

Our discussion started with one of my favorite spring blooms for fragrance–hyacinths. Jody recommended the Festival Series as a good choice. Festival Series hyacinths have a more open form than your traditional hyacinth and they are not so prone to flop over once they are in full bloom. Each bulb produces several flower stalks providing a full display. The Festival Series comes in pink, white, and blue, with a delicious fragrance. They create a nice, naturalistic look in the garden.
read more »

Next year’s bulbs make for a terribly confusing game of Connect the Dots.

Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen

Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education.

The tulip has been immortalized for centuries in many ways. Recently it was celebrated as a symbol of beauty and intrigue in Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire. Pollan chronicles the history of a flower that has seduce people throughout time and through its beauty has lead them to exalt; to speculate and squander; to make careers out of hybridizing – searching for the latest sensation in color, form and beauty. These efforts have brought the tulip from the obscurity of high mountain ranges in central Asia into the world market.

Like many bulbs, tulips are planted in the fall. They are neatly tucked 6-8 inches in the ground in areas with good drainage and full sun. The bulbs put out roots in the fall and then sit there waiting until the snow melts and the temperatures in the spring warms before they shoot up and flower early in the spring.

Now is the season to start thinking about doing your window shopping – going around to different gardens and parks to see what the myriad of colorful cultivars from bulb catalogs look like in person.

As you admire these cheerful harbingers of spring take a look at their form, their height, their color. Stick your nose close to the blossom – some are fragrant – many are not. Many tulips change their color as they age. Many change their color with the light and have a translucent quality to them.

Tulips generally only last for a few years in the New York climate and are generally used as annuals. They are often used in large springtime annual displays – planted en masse in the fall and ripped out in the spring – ending up in the compost pile.

Many homeowners do not want to devote an entire area in their garden to a labor intensive display. Rather, they would like to incorporate them into their pre-existing perennials borders and foundation plantings. Last fall we had two experts from Holland come over and discuss bulbs that performed well for a number of years and were good candidates for perennial plantings.

Some of the tulips that were recommended by the International Flower Bulb Centre were:
‘Ad Rem’, ‘Ballade’, ‘Ballerina’, ‘Cape Cod’, ‘Couleur Cardinal’, ‘Flaming Purissima’, ‘Golden Apeldoorn’, ‘Maureen’, ‘Menton’, ‘Negrita’, ‘Parade’, ‘Peer Gynt’, ‘Queen of the Night’, ‘Shirley’ ‘Showwinner’, ‘Spring Green’, ‘Spring Song’, ‘Toronto’, ‘Tres Chic’, ‘West Point’ and ‘White Triumphator’. There are many more tulips that perennialize well and experimentation is always encouraged.

So how long do they last in your garden? Well, in ideal conditions in Holland many of these tulips were thriving 10-15 years later. In the New York area I would not set my hopes so high and would plan for 4 to 7 years before you are planting some new bulbs.

Some tips for helping your tulips to keep coming back every spring is to fertilize them early in the spring with either a slow-release fertilizer or organic matter such as aged cow manure just as the leaves start to poke up above the ground. Plant them in areas with good drainage and plant them slightly deeper than normal – around 8 inches deep. Once the blooms have faded remember to deadhead your flowers by snapping off the seed head. The more foliage that you leave on the more the plant will be able to photosynthesize pouring energy into the bulb for next year’s flower.

Some good perennial companions for tulips are lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis), hardy geraniums (Geranium), blue star (Amsonia), phlox (Phlox paniculata), bugleweed (Ajuga), Siberian bugloss (Brunnera), avens (Geum), and bugbane (Actaea).

Tiny crocuses amid a frothy sea of Scilla on Wamsler Rock.

Scilla mischtschenkoana ‘Tubergeniana’

Chionodoxa forbesii (photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen)

It’s a sure sign of spring’s return: The Rock Garden is open again for the year!

Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen

I love bulbs.  When we bought our house upstate a few summers ago, I couldn’t wait to see what would come up in our yard come spring. After several chilly gray months, my impatience … I mean patience, was rewarded with a dazzling display. It turns out our front garden is a perfect place for naturalizing not just daffodils, hyacinths and crocuses, but also tulips!

And so for the past two falls I have diligently supplemented the beautiful display entrusted to us by our old farm house’s previous owners.  But the thing I’m realizing now is that I don’t really know how to plant bulbs. I mean, sure, I can dig a little hole and stick the bulb in (and the plantings have become much more successful now that my husband knows which end of the bulb goes up), but I don’t know anything about designing my bulb plantings. And don’t even get me started on integrating bulbs with perennials!

So it is with great anticipation that I am looking forward to a class being offered here at the Garden on Tuesday, November 23 with acclaimed landscape architect Jacqueline van der Kloet and renowned Dutch bulb expert Frans Roozen.  I absolutely love the Seasonal Walk here at the Garden which was designed by Jacqueline and her collaborator Piet Oudolf (with whom she worked on Manhattan’s High Line). It is a gorgeous, long stretch of a garden that intermingles bulbs and tubers, perennials, flowering shrubs, trees, and amazing ornamental grasses. Jacqueline will offer insight into this wonderful technique while Frans will offer technical advice on planning, planting, and naturalizing bulbs.

The class is being held here at The New York Botanical Garden. It’s from 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. and costs $28 for members, $31 for non-members. You can sign-up here.