An Act of Faith
Planting spring bulbs is the most optimistic thing a gardener does all year — burying dry brown parcels in cold soil for a reward six months off. Here’s when to plant them, how, and why they forgive you more than you’d think.
There’s no gardening job quite as hopeful as planting spring bulbs.
You do it in autumn, when the year is winding down and everything else is dying back — kneeling in cold, damp soil, pushing dry brown lumps into the ground on the strength of a promise. Nothing to see for months. Then one grey morning in February, when you’ve half forgotten they’re there, the first green tips push up through the cold, and the whole optimistic gamble pays off. I plant more of them every year, and the faith it takes never quite wears off.
The good news for the anxious among us — and bulb planting attracts anxiety — is that bulbs are far more forgiving than we give them credit for. Get the broad strokes right and they’ll do the rest.
When to plant them
The honest answer is: as soon as you get them home. A bulb sitting in a paper bag in the shed is a bulb slowly giving up; the sooner it’s in the ground, the better it will do.
Beyond that, the timing splits roughly in two. Most spring bulbs — daffodils, crocus, hyacinths, muscari, scilla — want to go in during September and October, ideally by the end of September if you can manage it. Alliums and other hardy bulbs are happy through autumn too.
Tulips are the deliberate exception, and it’s worth knowing why. Plant them last, in November or even into December — because the cold weather by then reduces the risk of tulip fire, a fungal disease that disfigures the leaves and flowers and spreads in milder, damper conditions. So while it feels like leaving them dangerously late, you’re actually doing them a favour. Tulips are the one bulb you should not hurry.
A note on snowdrops
Here’s something the usual bulb guides tend to get wrong, so it’s worth saying plainly: snowdrops are best not planted as dry autumn bulbs at all.
Along with bluebells and winter aconites, snowdrops dry out easily and often fail to establish from the shrivelled bulbs sold in autumn packets. The reliable way to plant them is “in the green” — as growing plants, in leaf, just after they’ve flowered in late winter — bought in bundles by mail order and settled straight into the ground. If you only ever plant snowdrops one way, plant them in the green. You’ll lose far fewer.
(And if you’re planting bluebells, choose the native English ones, Hyacinthoides non-scripta, over the coarser Spanish sort, which muscles out our natives and hybridises with them.)
How to plant them, in the ground
For everything else — the true autumn bulbs — the method is simple and hard to get badly wrong.
In beds and borders, bulbs look best in generous groups and drifts, never dotted about singly like soldiers. Aim for at least twenty-five of a kind, and more if you can, for anything like a proper show. For a natural look, scatter a handful and plant them exactly where they fall rather than arranging them; the randomness is the whole charm.
The rule for depth is two to three times the height of the bulb, with the pointy end — the shoot — facing up. Space them roughly twice their own width apart. Firm the soil gently back over them, give the ground a good soak to settle them in, and that’s the job done. They’ll take it from there, through the frost and the dark, entirely without you.
And in pots
Bulbs are made for containers, and a pot lets you carry the display right up to the doorstep where you’ll actually see it in February.
Use a deep pot and a free-draining mix — three parts peat-free multipurpose compost to one part grit is about right, since the enemy of a potted bulb is sitting wet. Plant at the same two-to-three-times depth, a bulb’s width apart, and water them in.
If you want a longer show from a single pot, layer them — the “bulb lasagne”. Set the latest and largest bulbs, tulips, deepest; a layer of compost; then daffodils; more compost; then the small early things, crocus and muscari, near the top. Each layer comes through in turn, and a single container flowers on and off from late winter well into spring.
Looking after them
Bulbs are close to the easiest plants there are, but a few small things make the difference between one good year and many.
Don’t let them dry out completely while they’re rooting, even over winter, though they won’t need much until growth begins. Once the foliage is up, a high-potassium liquid feed every week or two — the sort sold for tomatoes — helps them flower well and, more importantly, refuel the bulb for next year.
Which brings me to the single most important thing, and the one most often got wrong: when the flowers have finished, deadhead the spent blooms, but leave the foliage strictly alone. Let it yellow and die back completely in its own time. Those tired leaves are feeding next year’s flower back down into the bulb, and cutting them off early — or knotting daffodil leaves into those neat little bows, as people used to — starves the bulb and gives you a poor show the following spring. Resist the tidy instinct. Let the leaves do their unglamorous work.
Otherwise, bulbs largely ask to be left in peace. Most come back year after year, and many multiply and spread — naturalising, we call it — so a modest planting quietly becomes a generous one. That’s the real return on the autumn gamble: not one spring, but spring after spring, from a single afternoon’s faith.
If you’re running late
And if life got in the way and you’re staring at an unplanted bag in December? Don’t despair, and don’t hold them over.
Bulbs are forgiving. Planted in late autumn, or even in the depths of winter, most will still come up — perhaps a little later, perhaps a touch shorter in their first year, but up. The only real rule is not to plant into frozen ground. And that forgotten bag of bulbs discovered in the shed in January? Throw out any that have gone soft or mouldy, and get the rest in as fast as you can. A slightly disappointing first spring beats certain nothing, and they’ll come back stronger the year after.
Late is almost always better than never. That, really, is the whole spirit of bulbs.