Growing a Tulip Field and Tulip Gardens

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 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.

 – 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.

- 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.