Most of us don’t use bulbs in our gardens nearly enough. They’re one of the easiest ways to add color and interest to planting schemes, but it’s often tricky to remember to plant them months ahead of their flowering time.
Spring bulbs ready for fall planting.
The classic spring bulbs, like Snowdrops, Crocuses, Daffodils, Tulips and Hyacinths, are well known and commonly available. At Pondside we love all those too, but we like to offer our customers the lesser known beauties as well, all available in the fall.
The summer blooming bulbs and tubers we have for sale in spring and early summer already potted, in bud or flower, to pop right into the ground during the growing season. Easier to remember, and you can see right away what the plant looks like.
One can never have too many Snowdrops.
The gardening year starts with the blooming of the “little bulbs”: Winter Aconites, Snowdrops, Chionodoxas, Scillas and Crocuses, all early and always so welcome. Then the Daffodils begin and carry on for a month or more, in white through cream and every possible shade of yellow, into orange and coral and almost pink. Tulips come next (with overlap from the early species types) in their incredibly saturated hues, from subtle to gaudy, all delicious to the eye. As the days grow warmer the Hyacinths flower too, and the Fritillaries, Foxtail Lilies (Eremurus) and Camassias.
The species tulips, like ‘Bronze Charm’, are sweet, early and perfect for rock gardens.
A great new Allium cultivar, ‘Millenium’, is pretty in bud, flower and seedhead.
When spring melds into summer the Alliums take center stage, both the tall dramatic globular types and the shorter varieties that are perfect in rock gardens and perennial borders. At high summer come the true Lilies, stately and lavish in color and fragrance, and the fiery Crocosmias and Cannas to complement the lush foliage of July and August. Then the crescendo of the year arrives in late summer as the Dahlias flower, with their bewitching variety of flower forms and sumptuous colors to carry the garden through until frost.
Lilium ‘Casa Blanca’ is gorgeous and reliably perennial here in the Hudson Valley.
No gardener should be without some of these amazing plants, many of which will return and bloom year after year with very little care. Make a point of adding more old proven favorites to your garden, and experimenting with a few new bulbs every year, and in no time you’ll amass a collection of beauties that will give you pleasure and reliable display for many seasons to come.
Dahlias end the gardening year in a blaze of glory. This is ‘Akita-no-hikare’.