Growing a Tulip Field and Tulip Gardens
By Dave Pipitone
Deciding where to locate your tulip garden, or even a tulip field, involves surveying your land and visualizing what might be appealing.
The first thing to do is to walk outside, around your house and property, to discover what locations are good prospects. Review these ideas and mark down which option would be best for the locations you discovered.
Growing a Tulip Field
Would you like to have a large meadow of tulips, like the pictures from Holland? Look for a good size rectangular area, 20 feet by 40 feet or larger. A tulip field will be expensive to plant all at once, however, you can start with a smaller area and plant more bulbs each year.
Over five-to-ten years, you can have a sizable tulip field, as tulips perennialize and grow each year.
Growing Tulip Patches
Don't have a large area for a tulip field? Not to worry, you can design smaller areas, in two by three foot patches that add color and variety to your yard. Using as little as two dozen bulbs, you can create a tulip patch that will bloom every year with proper care.
Decorate Your Yard
Want to camoflauge the foundation of your home with beautiful flowering plants in early spring? You can plant tulip bulbs by grouping a dozen or more bulbs in the ground near the foundation of your house.
You can combine this with evergreen shrubs to complement the different colored tulip flowers. As you pay attention to the foliage color of annuals and perennials, they will become a backdrop for your tulips.
Beautify your Landscaping
Tulip bulbs can be planted under deciduous shrubs or small trees in the landscape, as long as there is enough light for tulips to grow.
Since most of these shrubs and trees don't grow leaves until later spring, there will be sunlight enough spring sunlight for the tulips. However, evergreen shrubs are not a good match since they will shade a tulip so that there is not enough light for tulips to grow and bloom.
By carefully selecting tulip bulbs to match blooming dates with the bloom of the shrub, they can provide a beautiful color contrast with early flowering shrubs such as forsythia or flowering quince. They can also be used in combination with smaller flowering trees like crabapple, Bradford pear or redbud.
Grow a Border
A border of low growing tulip bulbs planted around the edge of a vegetable garden, flower bed or even at the edge of the lawn can provide contrast and interest to the garden. Some species of tulips grow only eight inches tall, making them a perfect height for a tulip border.
When planning borders, it is essential to take into consideration the heights and spacing needed by different plants for a visually pleasing effect.
Design Your Garden
Tulips can be included in a design of your entire garden plan, including a perennial bed to add areas of spring color. Tulips will bloom during March, April and May before perennials start to flower.
You can place tulip bulbs in the flower bed so that when their blooming stops, the dying foliage will be hidden when the perennials start to come bloom.
Developing a garden tulip profile is an excellent way to determine which tulip types and blooming seasons are to your liking.
More Articles on Best Kept Secrets on How to Design a Tulip Garden
Tulip Festival in Holland MI, May 1-8, 2010
Helpful Money-Making Tulip Garden Design Tips
Overview of Holland Tulip and Festivals
Tips for Building a Garden of Tulips
Your Garden Tulip Profile is the Basis for a Successful Garden
Tulip Festivals in the United States
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