April is the time when the Skagit valley explodes in rainbows of daffodils and tulips (and cars driving to see same) for the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. This year there are four public display gardens including a new one – Tulip Valley Farms, which really has two sites, with many new activities. Display gardens require a ticket. Visiting the growers’ fields is free, but please keep your wheels and feet out of the plantings while taking your pix.
It's a beautiful site, especially on a weekday morning or late afternoon – particularly a drizzly one, when you’ll have some more elbow room. A good cloud cover will add drama and make the colors pop even more. To see what’s in bloom, check out this bloom map https://www.visitskagitvalley.com/skagit-valley-tulip-festival-bloom-map/.
These display gardens create new designs every year, from living rivers and organic mosaics to intricate shapes made of spring flowers. Oh, to have such a blank slate! Imagine the sublime combinations I could create.
But no, I am decidedly not starting from scratch. Every fall, I’m amazed about how many bulbs I ordered and their inverse relationship to the free space in the garden. I’m shoe-horning crocus and species tulips and small narcissus where I can under existing perennials and shrubs and relegating larger bulbs in pots.
And unlike planting perennials and shrubs, which are typically leafed out and often flowering when purchased, you can’t see the plants yet. It’s a bit of a guess as to what it will look like when it emerges.
Sometimes a happy accident creates beautiful combinations that fit right in, and other times, it looks like it was planting by mushroom-addled gnomes.
My favorite uses of bulbs are, in order:
- large drifts, planted like currents of a river (if more than one type, keep currents consistent)
- tufts of the same bulb repeated in strategic spots (a corner, around a tree, under a deciduous shrub). You’ll see this in many parks and arboreta.
- in pots – lets me move them as needed. I like to make color-themed ones.
Here’s what I’ve learned about how to place them:
- Plant perennial bulbs in places where their dying foliage can be covered by emerging plants or existing evergreen shrubs, and they won’t be disturbed.
- For instance, I have a host of narcissus (daffodils) and muscari (grape hyacinths) under our Italian plum tree. They don’t mind growing among the tree roots and it’s easy to remember they are there and to fertilize with bulb food occasionally, and. I don’t have a groundcover for them, but I look at it as a rustic area, so I don’t mind.
Pro tips for choosing bulbs, which are on order in a lot of online catalogs already:
- Smaller narcissus, like N. “Tete a Tete,” make a more graceful exit in a visible spot than larger “Ice Follies” and “February Gold.” For perennial tulips, look for species tulips, which are low growing, or Darwin hybrid tall tulips and give them the sunniest, most well-drained spot you have.
- Plant annual bulbs in open beds with few players, so it’s easy to remove and replace as needed.
- The Skagit display garden growers rip up those displays every year when the bulbs go dormant. In a new spot, you could still do the same if you had, say one evergreen perennial groundcover, like carex or festuca, with spaces in between for tulips followed by a summer annual, like geraniums or dahlias.
- Another great spot for them is in your veggie bed – if you have room between your fall and spring veggies, dedicate some space for tulips!
- I can’t imagine if I had to find all the tulips planted in my parking strip, which is why now I’ll have random singles – sole survivors – pop up, like an exclamation point, that don’t match anything else around them. (I usually snip them for bouquets.)
- Plan color echoes with their neighbors.
- My red species tulip is opening right next to the emerging burgundy foliage of the Itoh peony.
- Order fewer types, plant as many as can fit, close together.
- Even a small clump, well-placed, can make a big statement, like 10 purple hyacinths under the mailbox. For some reason I planted both blue and violet anemones in that same parking strip, and while charming, they are all bundled together, which wasn’t quite the idea I had in mind.
- Place taller-growing bulbs in the back or, if viewed from all directions, in the center. Why are my “Gypsy Rose” hyacinth behind the geranium Narcissus?!
- Mark your bulbs
- Use labeled markers, a ring of diatomaceous earth or stones, a clump of summer annuals or keep an excellent map. Ask me why ...
What are your favorite combinations?
