Be a Tu timer
GREET spring in style with flowering tubs bursting with sunny daffodil blooms, bold tulips and fragrant hyacinths.
You don’t need much skill to grow these bulbs – simply plant them the right way up 10-15cm deep in soil that is light and well draining.
Most varieties are winter-proof and without too much effort, will poke their noses through frost hard or soft and soggy ground.
For your best-ever spring garden, stagger planting times as well as varieties to enjoy a succession of colour that lasts the whole season.
For starters plant carpets of crocus for a sight to behold when the skies are grey. The vernus variety adds an alpine air. Then add daffodils, followed by exotic looking parrot tulips. They have beautiful crinkled, frilled or feather-edged petals in pure colours or with stripes.
Plant as late as November for blooms that will rub shoulders with brightly coloured wallflowers during May.
To look forward to s omething a bit special, plant mini narcissus such as Little Gem with crocus and anemones beneath your shrubs.
Lollipops
Scillas and dwarf irises such as golden iris danfordiae and purple reticulata are a good choice in any rocky alpine scree.
Plant a batch of Anemone coronaria The Governor now and enjoy a bold display of big poppy-like blooms in late spring. Soak bulbs for a few hours in lukewarm water to wake them up before planting 2.5-5cm deep.
Find room for ornamental onions with fuzzy rounded purple- mauve flowers that look like lollipops. They add a touch of stylish whimsy from May through to July.
Allium cristophii, which produces a flower head like a giant sparkler, is one of the best.
Even when flowers fade, the skeletal remains are curiously striking. When planting, place bulbs at a depth twice their own diameter.
They will come back year after year to form gorgeous big clumps.
A bold clump of majestic crown imperials can also be relied on to make a dramatic statement in a large border. Grow Rubra, which wears a striking coronet of upright leaves over its large, bell-shaped blooms, which are brick red.
Unfortunately the bulbs have a distinctive foxy odour.