If you search for signs of life in the garden soil from the first mild day of spring, then spring flowers in the garden could be your passion. However, choosing the right flower varieties can sometimes be difficult for home gardeners. If this is the case for you, you canFollow gardening tipsto get more flowers from your plants than ever before.
How to choose your spring flowers in the garden
The colder the climate, the more anxious gardeners are for signs of spring in the surrounding landscape. Planting bulbs that bloom very early can make you feel like you cheated the winter. This is because these hardy bulbs cannot begin to bloom until theChristmas decorations just coming down. Such dainty flowers aren't always impressive when you plant them in groups of a dozen or less. However, the affordable price of so-called small bulbs makes planting a hundred or more manageable.
Plant the right early bloomers
The common snowdrop, Galanthus nivalis, for example, bears graceful, white, bell-shaped flowers on 15 cm long stems. They bloom as early as January and grow wild easily in an undisturbed location. However, if you think white spring flowers are lost in the garden because of the snow, you might consider winter aconite, Eranthis hyemalis. This produces bright yellow flowers on a ruffled collar of green foliage. Finally, the snowy glory, Chionodoxa luciliae, produces masses of blue, pink or white star-shaped blooms to satisfy the craving for pastel spring flowers in the garden.
Combine hardy annuals with flower bulbs
If you ran out of steam after planting that first bag of fifty tulips last fall, your spring flower display may not look as lush as you hoped. Therefore, plant large bulbs such as tulips, daffodils and hyacinths with hardy annuals. The results could be similar to a gardening magazine or public garden exhibition you admired. With careful digging, you can also plant a six-pack of hardy annuals without disturbing the bulbs. Plant the annual flowers as soon as they are available if you want to see green leaf tips emerging from the bulbs. Accordingly, you could try out the combination of these four planting partners in spring:
- Tulips and primroses
- Hyacinths and pansies
- Daffodils and night levkoye
- Dutch iris (iris) and alyssum
Add flowering shrubs to the spring flowers in the garden
When creating a flowering landscape, follow the garden design principle of starting with trees, then shrubs, then plants. Flowering shrubs not only add texture and dimension to the garden in spring, but also provide plenty of blooms in sunny or shady conditions. For example, azaleas herald spring in many gardens in mild climates, while forsythias can do the same in temperate climates. However, if the thought of a plain green shrub among your spring flowers in the garden doesn't excite you, you can choose a shrub that produces bright berries after its flowers fade, such as the viburnum. You can also look for newer varieties of old favorites with colorful foliage, like daphne for warmer climates or elderberry for colder weather conditions.
Grow potted flowers
When incorporating flower pots for your spring garden, you can benefit from earlier blooming spring flowers in the garden. You can also hang small hanging baskets in a shed or garage when the temperatures drop at night. Large containers can also be moved to a protected area if you use transport wheels.
Some of the most popular container plants include snapdragons, petunias and annual lobelias. These thrive in cool spring temperatures. Such annuals reach their peak flowering in the cool season when daytime temperatures are around 20 degrees Celsius. Other potted flowers, such as violets and nasturtiums, can tolerate spring frosts well.
Plant crocus in the lawn
Planting bulbs under a lawn does not require any special skills. Simply allow these to naturalize by delaying mowing until the onion foliage matures. Choose the earliest-blooming bulbs unless you don't mind letting your grass grow as long as the flowers. Additionally, crocus bulbs are the most commonly grown flowers on a lawn. However, you can also try it with snowdrops or dwarf irises. Cut the sod with a sharp spade and plant clusters of bulbs at least 8 inches below the soil surface.
Grow bare-rooted perennials alongside the spring flowers in the garden
If you want to keep your flower garden looking good in spring, no one is happy about the sight of gnarled roots. However, there may be benefits to purchasing and planting bare root flowers early in the gardening season. Imagine you're already diggingfrom your garden in Marcha favorite daylily. This would look more like one of those root balls sold in plastic bags with a tentative stem starting to develop. In this unfinished form, plants are less likely to suffer damage from late spring frosts than plants with fully developed foliage. In fact, bare-root perennials can become indistinguishable from potted plants by mid-summer. As a bonus, bare root perennials are much cheaper than potted plants.
