University Place

Building a Bulb Lawn

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the 2018 Garden Expo. My name is Ben Futa and I’m the director of the Allen Centennial Garden here at UW-Madison. For those who aren’t familiar with the garden, just a quick but a shameless self-promotion. We are on the UW-Madison campus. We are always free and always open, so you can visit any time. And today I’m excited to be able to talk about this idea of bulb lawns because it’s something we’ve been experimenting with a lot in the Allen Centennial Garden, and other gardens are beginning to do it as well. And this is a concept of, as the title describes, adding a new dimension to your landscape. We’re going to sort of start with a primer, basically, and explore what you really should be thinking about as a gardener and as a homeowner before really looking at how to design a bulb lawn. But first actually answering the question of what is a bulb lawn. The good news is it’s a pretty self-explanatory term, basically planting flowering bulbs in your lawn.

Now, there’s a lot of different dimensions and aspects of that, which obviously we’re going to jump into here. You can see from this image that it can be something just as very simple as a few daffodils, which is probably is something most of us are familiar with, of seeing daffodils coming up through a turf scenario. But there’s a few things to consider if a bulb lawn is something you want to develop yourself. And these are sort these four considerations to really think about. The first is mowing. Based on the type of bulb lawn you install will also dictate when you should begin mowing, and this is critical because bulbs of course need to regenerate energy to bloom the next season. So as long as their leaves are green, they’re gathering energy and they’re storing that energy to produce the next year. And if we begin mowing too soon or if we cut off those green leaves, essentially what we’re doing is starving the plant of nutrients, and over time they’ll either stop blooming altogether and they’ll suffer and eventually disappear. And if we’re going to invest a lot of time, energy, and money into building a bulb lawn, then we should make sure that it’s, it’s an investment. The good news is once it’s in, it’s done, but also we, again, don’t want to shoot ourselves in the foot.

So consider when you’re comfortable starting mowing. And we’ll talk more about that in greater depth. Also think about your neighbors. I say this only because a bulb lawn is not terribly conventional. I am all for pushing the envelop and letting your freak flag fly and doing you in the garden, and I support all of you doing that. I want you all to be creative and think of yourselves as artists. I like to say that gardening is the slowest of the performing arts. So whether you realize it or not–[laughter] Whether you realize it or not, each of you is a choreographer, you’re a stage manager, you are setting a stage, you’re creating a performance of moments when things happen and recede and come on and come off. So you all are artists. But also your neighbors may not quite understand what you’re doing right away.

So thinking about how you design your bulb lawn but also how you communicate with those around you is critical so that you can enjoy it and others can enjoy it at the same time. Obviously budget. Plants cost money. But, as we look into this again, different types of bulbs are sort of scaled differently in terms of budget and expense, and we’ll look at that. And then also, actually, the scale. Are you working on the space sort of the size of this stage, or are you trying to fill an acre with bulbs? If you’re doing an acre, I really applaud you, but you’re going to need a lot of help to get it installed. These are labor-intensive to install the first time, but, again, the good news is it’s a one and done deal. Once it’s in, you don’t have to go back and replant it every year. It’s like a fine wine. It gets better with age.

So all of that being said, we’re going to look at a few of the tools that I found to be some of the most successful in doing this. And the first is the soil knife. And this is really phenomenal for doing really small bulbs, what I’m going to call minor bulbs. And calling them minor has nothing to do with them being insignificant. In fact, they’re very critical players. But minor referring to their size. So we’re talking things smaller than a quarter, if not maybe a dime. These are fairly tiny bulbs. And, basically, this tool allows you to– We’re planting probably into established turf. It’s probably compact.

You’re competing with a lot of the grass roots. You basically stick this into the soil, pull it back, create a wedge, drop your bulbs into that hole, and push the soil back in place. You’re not actually digging a physical hole. You’re not removing any turf to get these in. And why this tool is better than a trowel, you’ll notice it’s a one single piece of metal. Those no weld points. There’s no joints. Because on a traditional towel with a wooden handle and a metal digging implement, basically where those two come together is a weak point. And the more you put stress on it, the more sort of repetitive motion that that’s exposed to, the more likely it is to break or bend. And if you get 20 bulbs in the ground and your trowel breaks, you’re going to be cursing me, and I don’t want you to do that because why did he tell me to do this? So get a soil knife.

It’s going to make your life a lot better. And, again, this is good for minor bulbs and small installations. If you’re putting in 100 or 200 bulbs, this is a phenomenal tool to use for that. But if you’re going to go one step further, especially if you’re looking at doing larger bulbs, this steel spade is phenomenal. And I would recommend a steel spade in the garden no matter what. If you have difficult tree roots or an old shrub you’re trying to remove or a big ornamental grass, this thing is beautiful. Not only does it have that nice, sharp point so it can cut through a lot of tough things, but it also, again, is that one single piece of welded steel and metal. So it doesn’t have any weak points, you can put a lot of pressure on it, and you’re not going to worry about snapping your shovel handle, which, if you’re like me, has happened a couple of times with older tools. Depending on how big you really want to go. .

. [laughter] This tool is lovely. The gas-powered auger. You don’t have to buy one of these. You can rent them from a lot of tool and equipment supply stores. But this is, again, if you’re especially doing larger bulbs, this will make your job go a lot easier and make things go probably a lot faster. And, actually, I gave this talk yesterday morning as well, and someone actually recommended using a Sawzall to sort of cut out different patterns of your turf and sort of look at it as almost like peeling an onion in a way. So you’re taking the layer of turf back, you cut out the shape you want, and then you just lay your turf right back on top after you planted your bulbs. But, again, that is what I would call a mega installation. That is where you’re probably going to want to enlist either professional help or lots and lots of neighbors or nephews, grandchildren, cousins, whatever you have access to.

So, again, these are sort of the three layers, depending on how in depth you want to go, but these are some of the best tools for the job that are going to make you most successful in doing this. Again, I don’t want you cursing me next fall, going this is terrible, I hate this process. You should enjoy this. So, that being said, there’s three types of bulb lawns, and we’re going to walk through each of those, we’re going to look at some of the things to consider with each of these, and also what plants work well in each of these settings. So the first is early season, and when we’re saying early season, we’re really referring to probably, depending on the year, but I would say March to mid/early April is when your floral display will be happening. And after that, it basically turns back into a lawn. You would treat it as you would normally. So in this circumstance, you’re going to begin mowing your lawn when you normally would begin mowing your lawn. Again, probably mid to late April. Most of these bulbs, as you can see in this photo, they’re coming up through turf, but they’re actually ahead of the turf.

The turf hasn’t even caught up to them yet. And so they do most of their growing and flowering before the grasses got up and rolling, and because of that, you know, also, their leaves aren’t much taller than the grass around them. So even if you do start mowing and you take off little tips of these leaves, you’re not going to starve them for life like you would if you sliced them all the way to the ground or really removed that food source for them. This is also probably the least expensive. Again, most of these early spring bulbs are those minor bulbs. They’re small and the good news is, again, you can buy hundreds of them for pennies. I mean, a lot of the big wholesale bulb companies you can buy 100 snowdrops for 20 bucks or, you know, 500 Chionodoxa for 50 bucks. I mean, it’s really, you get a lot of bulbs for your buck. However, that’s still 500 bulbs that have to be planted. The good news is because they’re small they don’t have to be planted so deep.

You can get away with just using a soil knife, and it’s fairly easy to install. You really just sort of go through and make wedges and plant bulbs right behind you. It’s sort of a nice assembly line, catharsis moment. So, again, it’s, there’s a lot of small bulbs, but they’re easy to plant. And this is, again, I’m not prescribing one or the other. This is all for your consideration as you think about this. So now we’re going to look at a few of the species that really do this job well. And, again, I should note this talk will be posted on Wisconsin Public Television. The handouts will be available online as well, so you can enjoy the ride or you can take notes. So the first is Chionodoxa, glory of the snow.

Chionodoxa comes in a few different colors. We’ve got blues, purples, pinks, and whites. So, again, there’s a few different things to choose from, but if you’ve ever been driving around town in the spring and you see those blue lawns, it could be Chionodoxa, but it’s more likely Scilla. And this is Scilla. From a distance and a quick view, they look quite similar, but Chionodoxa is actually more floriferous. There are more flowers, but they’re slightly smaller. Versus the Scillas has bigger flowers but fewer of them. So, again, this I would argue still makes and impact. Both of these species, actually many of these species, especially the minor bulbs, are naturalizers. So that means that over time not only will the bulbs themselves sort of clump up and form bigger colonies, but as they get older, they will recede, they will spread themselves throughout the turf, which is probably what’s happened here.

And, again, the turf doesn’t mind. They’re very happy coexisting here. One is not out-competing the other. But, again, this, I should also say, is probably and old installation. This was not planted last year. So think about, you know, if you want this level of instant gratification, good luck. Have fun. [laughter] But, again, think about how densely you would have to plant those plants. You would have to remove all of your turf, plant all of these bulbs, and lay back your turf, versus planting into established turf. Gardening is all about patience.

Give it three to five years. It’ll start to look like this as it matures and as it ages. Scillas come in about the same colors as the Chionodoxa. We have pinks, blues, purples, and whites. All of these are sort of in the hyacinth family, and, you can see this is our bulb lawn at the Allen Centennial Garden, sort of a close-up. The Scilla is in bloom, and those little bits of sort of deep forest green, those are daffodils coming up. The daffodil leaves are only two or three inches tall at this point. So these are really early. This is pretty much the moment the snow thaws and the ground just begins to warm up, these guys will pop through. Also Scilla, this is a new variety we tried in the garden last year.

This is the pure white variety of Scilla. Really clean, really elegant, and, again, what a great contrast it is against, again, that brown background or just some– Again our turf really isn’t green quite at this point. It’s still just kind of modeled. So this white really is a strong, bright sort of exclamation point, if you will. Puschkinia also looks quite similar to, again, the Chionodoxa and things. But this one brings sort of that icy, steely blue, which is such a great spring color. And it comes in basically that steely blue and a white. There’s not a whole lot of variety there, but, again, you can get a lot of these bulbs for not a lot of money. They go quite a long way. Just so you know, this is a single bulb plant.

This is its very first season. So depending on how far apart you space these bulbs, maybe putting two or three in a hole will make your impact just a little bit bigger and move your display a long versus, again, this is your one. Okay, and bear in mind this is like three inches tall. I mean, this is fairly demur in terms of how plants go. Eranthis and Galanthus, I put these together because you could almost see a song evolving out of them or something, but Eranthis is the winter aconite. Those are the yellow that you’re seeing here. And Galanthus are snowdrops. So, of course, the white sort of pendulous flowers there. These are probably the earliest things to flower, at least for our area. So both of these, true to their name, one has winter in the name, one has snow in the name.

A lot of these can be seen popping up through snow drifts as we begin spring thaw. So they will give you the earliest signs of spring. They’re some of the most welcome harbingers in my personal opinion. And, again, both of them will colonize and reseed and naturalize very nicely. I will say for the winter aconite, those yellow flowers, if you do choose to plant them when they arrive, they’re rhizomes so they basically look like little clods of dirt. Be very careful when planting them. Don’t just sort of spread them out on the ground because you will lose them. Make sure you’re planting as, pull them out of the bag and plant right away because if they fall, they’re going to be gone forever, you’ll never find them. But you will also be surprised because they will probably grow where they fall. Again, give them a couple of years.

As they begin to reseed and you, the gardener, can help that reseeding, they typically mature by early June. You kind of take the seed pods, shuffling them up in your hands a little bit over the areas you want them to spread, and in two to three years you’ve got a new little colony. Same is true just about the snowdrop. The winter aconite really does well. The aconite does not like heavy soil, I will say that. So if you’re working in a really clay scenario or something like that, they do prefer better drainage, less compact soil. But the snowdrop doesn’t seem to care. It’ll grow just about anywhere. This is another pairing. The snowdrop again we’re seeing but also with Crocus.

Crocus is probably one of the most, if any of us have seen, again, bulbs in lawns, it’s either been the Scilla that we looked at in the very early slide or the Crocus. Again, Crocus is one of those sort of poster children for bulb lawns. There’s a lot of colors now to choose from in golds and blues and pinks. Sort of just really a lot of really great variety, different species as well to choose from. And, again, over time they will naturalize, they will do pretty well. Iris reticulata, this is the rock garden Iris. And while it has rock garden in the name and they do fabulous in rock gardens, they also do really, really well in bulb lawn settings. And some of the good news about this is when they bloom, their leaves are almost no existent, but these leaves can get four, five, six inches tall, but they look like grass. The moment these are done flowering, they completely disappear, they blend in. You would never know these were in your lawn except for the week and a half to two weeks that they give you that show in early spring.

These come in, again, a range of colors. They’re introducing a couple new ones every year. The pinks, there’s some pinks, blues, and purples, but this is my favorite. There’s something about this time of year, and as I’m giving this talk more I’m realizing I have a personal bias coming through that I really like this sort of icy blue color. It’s just not something we’re used to seeing, I think, this time of year. But that icy blue with those pinks falls is a really, really nice pairing. And, again one single bulb will give you one single flower. So think about if you want this kind of impact on your lawn, you’re going to need maybe a small handful of plants to really make that impact happen. Also grape hyacinth. This is another one that does really, really tremendously in a bulb lawn setting.

But this one is starting, I put it into the early season because it’s sort of bridging the gap between an early season bulb lawn and a mid-season. This is going to be the latest bloomer you’ll probably have. And, again, we’re talking probably early to mid-April here, depending on the species. But not all grape hyacinth are created equal. There are, again, a lot of new cultivars out there, and you may be tempted to try and go in the direction of using some of the funkier ones. Before you buy a lot of them, before you put them into a bulb lawn, I would encourage you to get a small quantity, test them out in your own garden for maybe a couple of years to see if they still perform well year after year. Valerie Finnis, which is this cultivar and also the straight species, the deep grape purple. That’s the Muscari armeniacum. Both of those naturalize beautifully. They’re very inexpensive.

Again, you can get big quantities for not a lot of money. And, again, they’re just these nice solid colors. They just perform really well, and we know that they do well in the long term. So those are sort of our early season favorites. Those are the things, and, again, when you see all of those together, imagine yourself creating a design using all of those different things. There’s so many tools in the toolbox to use. And even something like the Scilla and the Chionodoxa that we looked at, at the very start, the Chionodoxa actually blooms maybe a week or so before the Scilla. And so much of building a bulb lawn is about finding how to create as long a succession of bloom as possible. Again, if you’re going to be digging holes in your lawn and this is hard work, may as well make it worth the effort. You don’t just want to do this for a week’s worth of impact.

Try introducing and using a lot of different bulbs and different species. I think you’ll be grateful of that. So now we’re going to move into mid-season. And so now there’s a few different things first to consider and things begin to change and morph a little bit. So in a mid-season bulb lawn you’re going to begin mowing a little bit later in the season. Again, these bulbs bloom later. They’re foliage is taller. And the foliage needs more time to mature and come to. . .

fruition is the wrong word, but come to maturity, basically. We know bulb foliage is mature when it starts to turn brown and yellow and you can give it a gentle tug and it just comes right off. If you tug on it and it’s still attached, it’s still photosynthesizing, it’s still putting energy into the bulb, and we don’t want to remove the foliage yet. So you want to try and plan your first mowing for after all of this, once all the bulb foliage has matured. Typically that’s late June, first part of July. So, again, and we’ll look at a couple photos of what the lawn looks like when nothing’s blooming in it but the grass is long. Again, that’s something for you to consider as the gardener, as the homeowner, but we also have a couple of tricks to help us get around that as well. This is going to be a little more expensive, but it also depends on how you look at it. These larger bulbs do cost more money. It seems like as the bulbs get larger so do the price points.

But also you don’t need as many bulbs to fill the same amount of space. You don’t need to put five or six tulips in a hole to make an impact. One will do just fine just because they are bigger. And, again, it’s also going to be a little bit more work to install. These bulbs have to be planted deeper. You will actually need to dig holes for these. The wedge method will not work as well. You actually have to get them down. Rule of thumb with most bulbs is they should be three times the depth of the height of the bulb. So take, say, a daffodil is two inches high, times three, it should be six inches deep.

That’s just your generic rule of thumb. So, again, a little more work, possibly more expensive, and your mowing begins a little bit later. So this is our bulb lawn at Allen Centennial, and this is what it looks like in probably the height of June. Now, for me personally, this is beautiful. I love having this element in a lawn. When these seed heads collect dew and mist in the morning, it really is a magical thing. And I would so much rather see this in the garden than flat turf. I mean, that doesn’t do anything when that dew and that mist settles in late spring or early summer. Again, you can kind of see some of the, maybe even not much. There is daffodil foliage actually up in that grass.

So it is still mingling, it is still photosynthesizing, but it’s kind of hidden, again, by the long turf. When you do begin mowing, you will be baling hay for the first time. Set your mower as high as it’ll go. Three, three-and-a-half inches is typically what we work with. And just go slowly, make sure you get a nice, clean cut, and then rake thoroughly. Get all of the thatch out because if you have any areas of heavy detritus material, it will harm your lawn in the long term. So make sure it’s nice and raked clean. You might have to mow it twice. And the first week-and-a-half or so after you mow, your lawn is going to pout a lot. It’s going to look rough.

You’re going to think you killed it. You didn’t. It’s fine. Turf is very durable. It will bounce back. But give it a good drink, give it a good soak if you haven’t had rain in a while after you make this cut. And it, again, two-and-a-half to three weeks tops it’ll be green and lush and blend in with the rest of your lawn. You won’t even know that you did this, but there will be that probably two- or three-week down time. Again, just something to think about. So, now we’re going to look at a few of the plants that make this mid-season work really well.

This is one of my, again, some of these are in combination, some of these are single species, but Narcissus and Hyacinthoides. Narcissus, again, tons of daffodil varieties out there. Miniatures, big cup, small cup, multi-flowering. All of them are reliably perennial, all of them naturalize very well. The hyacinth is pretty much this sort of purplish blue. That’s about all you’re going to get in terms of color variety. But both of these are sort of whimsical and natural and very relaxed. This is sort of a meadow-esque, naturalized planting. This isn’t a really formal arrangement of plants. But, again, you can count the number of plants in there that makes that look appealing.

I don’t know, a dozen, maybe. Again, we’re not talking about tons and tons and tons of bulbs to make an impact and fill a space. Leucojum, the giant snowdrop, and it bears mostly just resemblance in terms of the name to actual snowdrops. But the bulbs themselves when you get them, they will look like daffodils. And the foliage when they emerge also looks like daffodils. So until they actually flower, you may think they’re daffodils, but they’re not. They do really well in these naturalized settings. They’re just delicate and airy and sort of whimsical. And it’s something that we really just don’t see in our gardens around here very much. And it’s one of those plants that I wish we planted more of.

Again, it broadens the palette beyond daffodils, as much as I love daffodils. Another plant that I think we don’t do enough due credit in the garden, both in a bulb lawn setting but also just in our beds and borders, are the oriental hyacinth. And I think the reason that we sort of don’t think of planting these in our beds is because we’re right now trained to force these over winter. We do them when we do paperwhites and amaryllis around the holidays, traditionally. And because of that you’ll know, if you’ve ever dealt with these, they have a very potent fragrance. It’s sort of a really rich, spicy, sweet. And, again, when you force them indoors, say they’re in your kitchen, you open the door to your kitchen and it can bowl you over. The scent is that powerful and that fragrant. But when they’re used in a bulb lawn, it’s just sort of this really nice perfume that floats on the air, and you just get whiffs of it but it doesn’t knock you back. But also because we typically have used these as forcing plants, we usually think that they’re annuals.

We sort of treat them as disposable. They’re reliably perennial. Like amaryllis you can’t plant outdoors here. Paperwhites you probably can’t do outdoors here. Hyacinth you can. And the good news with hyacinth is this begins to open up all sorts of colors of the rainbow. If you’ve ever opened a bulb catalog to the hyacinth page, there’s reds and purples and salmon and yellow and blue and white and cream, and there’s so many colors to really, I almost use these are the accent colors because so many of our other bulbs that we’re working with are sort of the yellows and the whites and sort of just have a set parameter. These do so much more. You can see this is our bulb lawn as well. That hyacinth in the background.

You really don’t need a lot of them to make an impact, but these are blooming before the daffodils. This is sort of a nice intermediary moment. And just to prove I’m not crazy, this is Great Dixster, a wonderful garden in the UK, and this is their bulb meadow space. Those little flecks of purple that you see sort of drifted throughout? Those are hyacinth. And, again, in this particular setting, they don’t look contrived, they don’t look out of place. They look like something that has been there forever. And, again, I’m sure as you walk along that garden path, imagine that sweet and spicy fragrance just sort of catching your nose a little bit. But it doesn’t bowl you over. It’s a plant that I think deserves more use in our gardens across the board. Camassia, this is a plant where if you’re working in a space that maybe you have heavy clay, maybe it holds water in the spring, Camassia actually prefer and like wet conditions.

Most often the rule of thumb with bulbs is: keep them away from water, they need good drainage. If they don’t have it, they will rot. Camassia is that alternative to that. If you put Camassia in a space where it doesn’t get enough moisture, it’ll grow but it’ll struggle and eventually it could die out if it’s too well-drained. Versus Camassia, you put them along streams, they don’t want to be submerged. They don’t want to be in a pond or in a marsh, but if you have an area that’s, in spring thaw it’s a little squishy or, again, can hold water after rain, Camassia do really well. There’s a little variety with them, there’s some deeper blues. This nice clear, sort of pure royal blue. And then some pale creamy colors as well. So not a lot of color variety, but look at the height.

I mean, we’re talking about two-and-a-half to three feet on some of these. So they really are very underutilized bulbs for us but have a lot of potential. The checkered lily, Fritillaria meleagris. This is sort of an outstander in most of these. Most of these bulbs are what I would, again, call major bulbs. They’re bigger. This guy is tiny. It could fit a couple of them on a quarter. They can go a long way. They’re fairly inexpensive.

You can get a lot for not a lot of money. But how fun are those petals? I mean, it really looks like a checker board. But, because they’re small, you may want to plan to do a couple per hole. I wouldn’t just do one here and there. The impact may not be the same. Because, you can see when they’re sort of naturalized in this larger drift setting how tremendous they are and how atypical this is to see. And they’re blooming alongside daffodils and a lot of these other sort of mid-season plants that we get to play with. This one, in particular, can tolerate a little bit of moisture. They’re very adaptable to any setting, but they can take just a hair more moisture than some other things can. Alliums.

So, I should just preface this by saying I have a historically sort of love/hate relationship with many Alliums. When I was younger, I used to think, “Oh, these are really contrived thing, “balls on sticks, who would want to plant these?” But, if you’ve, sort of the big, broad, wide, wonderful world of Alliums, they aren’t just spherical. There’s a lot that sort of look like fireworks, that are sort of these asymmetrical forms and shapes. Different heights, different colors, different bloom times. There’s really a lot of variety out there. And the good news is most of these plants, almost all of these plants are basically critter-proof. Nothing’s probably going to eat most of these, but especially Allium. Things don’t like to munch on them. So if you are planting something that, again, critters might enjoy, planting Allium in the same hole with it may help to deter some of those pests. Tulips.

So tulips have a couple of caveats. We’re going to talk about species tulips first before we get to the more traditional tulips. Species tulips, as you can see, these are the same height as grape hyacinths. These are more or less minor bulbs. They are small, you can get a lot for not a lot of money, but man do they naturalize. They will reseed, they will clump up, and they will be back year after year quite reliably. Critters can sometimes like to dig these up, but the good news about putting these into a lawn scenario is that it’s much harder to dig these up. It’s a little bit of a deterrent, basically. So imagine if you were this squirrel or, you know, whatever. Would you rather dig something up out of a nice, you know, frothy, wonderful aerated and cultivated garden bed, or would you rather try and dig through really tough turf to get the plant you want to get out? So putting it in turf helps to insulate these just a little bit.

But, these are smaller, they don’t necessarily look like our traditional tulips that we’re used to. They’re a much shorter stature. But, again, really tremendous. Mixing them with grape hyacinth, who’d a thunk it? So now we’re looking at bigger tulips. These are the ones that we typically associate with seasonal displays. And, I say there’s some caveats with this because it’s very important to choose the right tulip species if you choose to do these big ones in your lawn. When you’re looking for them, you want to look for the simple forms and the solid colors. So any of those big peony tulips that are like triples, not even doubles, just huge, massive flowers, overly frilly or any of the multi-flowering tulips, stay away from those. Mostly because those plants are specifically grown in a nursery setting for many years to put on one big show. They’re intended to be an annual for a one-time shot because if you’ve ever planted those in your garden and left them, the next spring the flowers are half the size, if they flower at all, and by the third year they’re just green and they almost never flower anymore.

Versus more of these solid colors. Something like the Darwin hybrid tulips. They’re these nice solid colors. They’re very simple shapes. But they will, over time, naturalize, perennialize. They do very well. Because we think of tulips as just these mass bedding plants, they actually can work well used correctly in these naturalized settings. And so this is an image that’s actually a good segue into starting to think about design of your bulb lawn as well. In thinking about garden design in general, I try to not be prescriptive because ultimately it’s your decision. You’re the creator.

You’re the artist. I just want to give you the tools and the knowledge so you can make your own decisions. Most of the bulb lawns we’ve looked at up to this point are naturalized. So, basically, someone took a handful of bulbs, scattered them over the lawn, and planted them where they fell to make it look as natural and organic as possible. In this particular setting, you can see they’re almost planted on a perfect grid. They’re spaced, these little clumps are spaced pretty much equidistantly. So this already starts to give a very different feeling and a very different aesthetic than that naturalized area. The other thing to think about is notice there’s like five or six different flowers and plants coming up out of the same hole. They planted the same bulbs all in one hole. So they chose two different, two tulips and two daffodils, I believe, and they took that auger, drilled a hole, put all those bulbs in there together, and the good news about bulbs is they know which way is north.

They’re very smart. They will all come up around each other, and that’s what’s happening here. Yes, they’re sort of tight and close together, but it’s almost like these little bouquets just stuck throughout the lawn, which is, again, they kept it simple. They kept it to just these four plants, but imagine if you introduced other species and other colors into this. This is also a good point to speak to succession of blooms. So, this is just at the very start of this mid-season push. Again, the yellow tulips and those sort of cream and yellow daffodils, those small cupped, are just beginning to flower, but fast forward about a week-and-a-half and this is what we have. They did well. [laughter] But now, suddenly we can see those yellow tulips. They’ve almost gone over.

They’re just, they still look okay, but they’re starting to fade. But now the purples are really coming in. Now the purples are just hitting their stride. And the large cup daffodils are starting to bloom. They’re now the second wave of this daffodil display. So, this whole argument of if you’re going to dig a hole and make time to put bulbs into your lawn, get more than a week-and-a-half out of it. Choose plants that extend your season of bloom. And as you’re looking through bulb catalogs, the thing to look for is you’ll see April, April/May, and May under bloom time. Those are the three categories that they typically break them into. April, most of these probably described as April or April/May.

So those are going to be your sort of, if you could imagine a subcategory under mid-season bulbs, there’s sort of these three subcategories. This is probably April or April/May. This is probably things that say April/May or May. So, again, as you’re selecting your bulbs, not only looking at your colors, but also looking at that succession because obviously there’s overlap here. The purple and the yellow tulips are blooming together, but one is just a hair later than the other. And if you really like yellow, if you just want yellow, get an April yellow, and April/May yellow, and a May yellow, and you will have three to three-and-a-half weeks of bloom rather than a week. So something to think about as you’re making your selections. So, this is the setting in which we’ve sort of been zooming back this whole time to see where this garden is really located. And, you can see this isn’t probably much larger or much smaller than many of our city lots, maybe even much larger than this room. Actually, it’s half the size of this room.

It’s not a huge space, but there’s probably a couple thousand bulbs in this lawn. I mean, there’s a lot. But, once it’s in, it’s done and it just sort of rolls. But something I want to draw your attention to, aside from the bulbs themselves as sort of looking at the overall composition, is notice they’ve kept that nice, clean strip of turf mown and cut around the edge. So not only for the sort OCD people and me that, you know, I like those clean edges, I like separation, I like contrast, this goes all the way back to the beginning with thinking about your neighbors and thinking about your general area in that this shows that you haven’t forgotten. Because obviously. . . [laughter] Obviously right now it looks very intentional. Obviously you planted flowers in there, so obviously you’re not mowing.

But, again, fast forward to, you know, a month later when the bulbs aren’t blooming anymore and you just have these sort of. Personally I think these sort of waves and elegant, cascades of the turf is really elegant and wonderful. But for those of us that are trained for a perfectly manicured lawn, if they were to see this, they’d say, “What the hell is going on?” But having that nice, clean border sort of says, “I haven’t forgotten, there’s still someone “taking care of this, and this is intentional. ” And they’re subliminal messages but they’re important all the same. The other thing this does, you can almost imagine this is almost like a picture frame. It just sort of reins things in a little bit. If these bulbs went all the way up to the edge of the path, it almost might be too much. They’d flop over the edge, it would maybe look a little untidy. The nature of bulb lawns, especially these late season or mid to late season bulb lawns, the turf is going to be longer, things are going to be a little more riley, and this just helps you to keep things bound in a little bit. And, the nice thing about– And by the way, this is all at Chanticleer I’ve had that on the names, but Chanticleer is a fabulous public garden on the East Coast.

If you ever get out there, please visit. But, again, they have taken this challenge of a bulb lawn one step further and said, “Well, when the bulbs are done, “we really aren’t ready to mow this yet, “we like the look of this turf, how can we spice it up?” And so every season they choose two or three, maybe four, seasonal plants, annuals, bulbs, something like that. This is a mix of dahlias, tassel flower, and verbena. Three things, and they basically just go through and plug that into the turf right as the bulb– They don’t remove any of the bulbs, the bulbs are still there. They’re sleeping. They’ve gone dormant. But now you have this wonderful sort of late summer and into fall display that keeps the color. And, this looks very intentional. It is natural, but it’s very constructed. It’s very contrived.

It’s not a prairie re-creation or a meadow by any means, but it’s an aesthetic decision that they made. Here for us locally in Madison, we’re lucky to have other bulb lawns to look at. Olbrich has several. And when I say lawns, I actually should be more explicit and say this is more of a bulb meadow. So a bulb meadow versus a bulb lawn is sort of two different things. In Olbrich’s, you can see some of those bolder plants in through there. They’ve actually brought in other flowering perennializing plants, and they might mow this once or twice in late summer. Once everything has sort of done its time, they’ll take the lawn down, they’ll clean it up a little bit, and then it starts the process again the next season. But, again, just looking at, count the number of bulbs in there that actually make an impact. Maybe 50? A couple dozen? These are two very different designs.

This is very intensely, heavily planted. This is a little more minimalist, but this is also more relaxed, more meadow, more natural. So, ultimately, it’s your aesthetic. It’s your choice of the look you want to create. The budget to create this is probably much lower than it was that really intensely planted one. So now we’re going to late season. And, basically, late season, there’s only a couple choices. This is easy. So late season, mowing basically is going to happen mid-year. So if you want to treat your lawn as a typical lawn for part of the season, you’re going to begin mowing probably late June, first part of July, maybe early July.

You really just have to look, see what the bulbs are telling you. You can start mowing in midsummer. You could then keep mowing consistently. You could mow every week as you normally would if you want to do that and this will still work. It’s still going to be fairly expensive. These are the biggest bulbs you’re probably going to get. But, again, you don’t need that many to make an impact. And, it’s the same amount of work to put these in as it is the other ones, so if you’re going to do a mid-season lawn, you may as well do a late season lawn at the same time. So, again, there’s only a couple choices here. And from a color perspective, pink is what you have to work with.

That’s pretty much it. So the first one is the autumn crocus, the Colchicum. And the nice thing about these as you’re seeing all of these different clusters of flowers coming through, that isn’t 15 or 20 bulbs in a hole. That’s one bulb producing all of those flowers. Most crocus, the spring crocus are about the size of a quarter. They’re fairly tiny. The fall crocus are the size of a softball. They’re huge, but again, per plant, per bulb, you get these sort of little pockets of color. The nice thing about this, you can see the grass is relatively short here. Once they did their spring display, they came through and started mowing it regularly.

But once these late summer and fall blooms began to come through, they stopped mowing to let them bloom. So you’ll also notice that there’s no leaves here. These bulbs, the crocus and then the surprise lilies we’ll look at, they put up their leaves in spring with everything else. All of these other bulbs, they do all of their photosynthesizing, they capture all of their nutrients, and then they go dormant over the year. And, probably sometime later August, maybe September, the soil temperature and timing just hits the right note and suddenly, poof, all of these emerge at the same time. It really is magical. It’s really a special thing. And, the Lycoris behave in the same fashion. They go by, these go by a number of common names. Surprise lily, resurrection lily, naked lady lily, all kinds of things, but there’s no leaves here.

The flower stalks just popped right out of the ground. And, you have to sort of budget for the square footage they need in the spring. Again, this is all leaves in the spring, but then they senesce and go dormant and you almost forget that they’re there until suddenly, poof, these things emerge. I like these because it’s just a nice kind of fun. They’re fairly ephemeral, especially if it’s a really, really hot, dry summer. These may only last a week, tops. If it’s a more mild, cooler summer, you could get a week-and-a-half to two out of these. But we’re not talking about a huge mega fall display. But the nice thing about these is they are hitting in the doldrums of summer, again August/September when fall really hasn’t hit. We don’t have asters yet.

We don’t have fall color. We don’t have any of those things. And if it’s been a hot and dry summer, we’re just all sort of over it. This gives us something to look forward to. Just a nice sort of, you can make it over the finish line. You can do this. So all of that being said, those are sort of our three categories of bulb lawns. So now, to wrap up, we’re going to look at sort of a case study of an actual designed bulb lawn from start to finish, just to give you guys a sense of, again, sort of how we went through this process. We’re going to use our bulb lawn at the Allen Centennial that we installed a couple of years ago. For us this was as student project.

Sage, she’s a landscape architecture student, and so I’m happy to share her story and her experience. So first she laid out– And, these are questions that I would implore all of you to think about with any design project, anything you’re doing. But ask why you’re doing this. What are your ultimate goals? What do you want to get out of this? So first we wanted to install a bulb lawn in our English garden. Our English garden is one of our signature spaces. And, again, in very, very early spring we needed a little kick. We needed something to happen that added some interest. She also wanted to choose context-appropriate plant material. If you were to go to England, you would see coming up through their lawns or seen in their flowerbeds. We wanted to create a unique green space for visitors.

So something that is there, again, bulb lawns are ephemeral. They’re not a full 12 season thing. So we wanted to sort of create a room or an experience that is special just for a month or so. And we also wanted to get people to interact with plants a little more. We wanted them to get closer to them and, you know, especially in spring people are laying out on the lawn. They’re soaking up the sun for the first time. You know, what if they’re laying down next to bulbs? How magical would that be? So these are a few of the, again, that sort of precedent studies that she did. Again, with Google is a phenomenal tool. Just Google bulb lawns in England, and you’ll get pages and pages of stuff. So she looked at everything from traditional borders to formal and informal arrangements of bulbs in lawns.

And, again, there’s so many things out there for good research. But she did a lot of this precedent and background. And then she started sketching. And, she’s a landscape architecture student, but I would argue that all of us are designers. Any of us can whip out a pencil and paper and just start doodling stuff. And it just helps us to put our concrete, put ideas into practice and start to, especially with bulbs in a bulb lawn. Once they’re in, they’re in. You ain’t moving them, so make sure you really like it or you have a sense of what’s going to be happening. So in this scenario, you can see she’s starting to play with different drifts, different sizes of bulbs, different groupings. Here’s just another one.

Again, different types of drifts and different arrangement of plants. But you’ll notice a consistency through all of those. We had a path down the center of the lawn. And that’s because we have that gazebo at the very top of the image. That’s sort of at the very end of the garden. So when you’re standing at the base of the garden and looking across the lawn, because of that pathway, A, it does what I mentioned earlier as it shows that we haven’t forgotten. Especially in a public garden, if people were to walk through and just see a bunch of tall grass, they’re thinking, what the hell is going on here? This should always be manicured and looking good. But because we have this path carved out, it shows that we haven’t forgotten. And the same is true for any of us. The other thing we did was add this sort of circular area at the center.

So we actually created a garden room with in our lawn. A lot of us, I think, when we think about creating outdoor spaces and garden rooms, we think about enclosure and having fences or trees or a lot of furniture or something like that, but it doesn’t necessarily always need all of those things. Just by doing this, we implied that this is a space where you could come to gather. And typically, these lawns are so expansive that no one really wants to sit on them. They want to sit on the edges or, you know, to look over the lawn but not actually sit on the lawn. When the bulb lawn blooms now, people move to this central space. This is where they put their picnic blankets and lay out, and we do move some furniture in there temporarily. But in the middle of summer when the bulb lawn is gone, why would we have chairs in the middle? That doesn’t make any sense. But for this moment, it does. And so this is what we had in our first season.

You can see that circular center space where those chairs are. That became sort of that outdoor room element. That mown path up the center, very similar to this image that we started with, implies movement. You can see, it probably was me, had already walked sort of down that, the dewy turf grass there. And, again, this one is very simple, but it shows that there’s a human mind at work. It shows that we haven’t forgotten. Very similar to ours, there’s a focal point at the end of this. So especially if you have sort of one of these areas, something you want to draw attention to in the spring, just for that moment these can be really powerful visual tools to communicate that. This is just her quick plant list. So, you can see we’re not talking hundreds and dozens of varieties.

There’s six or seven here. But look at those bulb quantities. To make this display happen, 400 of this, 1600 of that, 1,000 of this. 1400 of that. There’s a lot. Again, a lot of these were minor bulbs. We only did daffodils and a few of the oriental hyacinth as sort of our big pushes. But, again, there’s a lot of planting. Our interns, our volunteers, our staff, a couple of weeks we worked on this. But, it’s been in and it’s been going.

Once it’s done, it’s done. And this is what we have. People enjoy it. People use it. The same could be true for you and your own lawn. So that being said, thank you so much. I appreciate your time and your attention. Thank you. [applause]