Creating Bulb Meadows
One of the most reliable ways to create low maintenance year after year colour in your garden is naturalising bulbs in grass. The key is picking bulbs that will thrive in the conditions you have. Before you start shopping a little exploration into soil type, drainage, aspect and light levels will help you succeed.
Naturalising bulbs in grass is one of the ways we have been trying to add colour to a green space in our local community. We live in Newmilns and have been helping to look after a site on the river. It has been great to see some of the naturalising Tulips we planted are starting to become established. We found that the soil is sandy and therefore it is particularly suited for naturalising tulips. Alongside @lovenewmilns and other volunteers from the community we have planted nearly 1000 Tulips bulbs at Nelson St since Autumn 2022.
There’s plenty more to flower this year – in total we’ve planted nearly 6000 bulbs. I’m especially keen for when the 500 native bluebells appear. They went in as relatively immature bulbs but I’m hoping we will have a decent show soon.
Extending the display
We have also planted Camassia on some of the less sandy areas to give some colour into the late spring, start of summer. We didn’t have huge budget so we are playing the long game with these and hoping they will spread with time.
In many community projects it’s important to stretch the funds as far as possible. To that end we often wait until right at the end of the season and pick up some of the real bargains. We are usually ordering quite robust bulbs anyway for naturalising in grass and have found them to be quite forgiving and flexible in terms of when they are planted. Some of the suppliers we have used and felt provided a good service and price were gedneybulb.co.uk and J.Parkers.
Here’s a list of what we have planted:
2750 Daffodils
– 1000 Narcissus ‘Ice Follies’
– 1000 Daffodil ‘Minnow’
– 750 Narcsissus jonquilla ‘Pipit’
1000 Tulips
– 250 Tulip fosteriana Sweetheart
– 250 Tulip pulchella ‘Persian Pearl’
– 500 Tulip darwin mixed
500 Snowdrops
750 Crocus
– 250 Blue Pearl
– 250 Cream Beauty
– 250 Sieberi Firefly
500 Native Bluebell
200 Camassia leichtlinii caeruleun
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