Bulbs the way nature intended

The idea of aping nature is not entirely new: For more than a century, influential gardenmakers have been urging home gardeners to plant drifts of natural looking bulbs, especially daffodils, snowdrops and crocuses. But even if you follow a toss-and-plant method, many people can’t seem to resist the neatnik impulse as they bury bulbs underground, and what might have been vividly wild colonies often emerge in spring as defined amoebas, a little too man-made.

Fifteen years ago, van der Kloet decided to take the method of naturalised planting a step or two further. Before scattering the bulbs, she mixed varieties together, not random bedfellows but considered pairings that would look harmonious.

This approach has been fueled by a revolution in small bulbs, which used to be called minor bulbs for their size and place in the marketplace, as opposed to major league tulips, daffodils and hyacinths. Today, however, these petite bloomers are all the rage.

The arrival of specialty bulbs and natural ways of using them has coincided with the rise of the naturalistic garden of perennials and grasses, and the two go well together, says van der Kloet, who was one of the principal designers of the 2002 Floriade, the Netherlands’ once-a-decade exposition of horticulture and landscape architecture. Cut back your perennials, lay bare your beds and plant the scattered bulbs within. Once happily installed, bulbs and perennials will look good with little maintenance for years, she said.

The total number of bulbs depends on the area you want to cover. As a rule of thumb, van der Kloet uses about 80 bulbs per 10 square feet in a bed shared with perennials, fewer for larger bulbs such as hyacinth and daffodils. She would take a handful of bulbs and gently throw them in drifts, and because the coverage was purposefully not uniform, some parts of the area would be more densely sown than others. Each bulb was not slavishly planted just as it fell. ‘‘It’s a little more effort, but the result is better, too,’’ she said.

Enter Piet Oudolf, a European design star who weaves loose but never ragged tapestries with hardy herbaceous plants. Among his many high-profile commissions is the plant design for the renovation and redesign of Battery Park in New York. The 23-acre park at the tip of Manhattan draws 4 million people a year, mostly tourists waiting for the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. But it had become seedy and unloved until a group called the Battery Conservancy and its president, Warrie Price, came along to galvanize its revitalisation. Last week, with a bitter wind blowing off New York Harbor, Oudolf and van der Kloet were in the park orchestrating the planting of 70,000 bulbs in 23 beds where thousands of perennials were installed in the spring to Oudolf’s design. Created beneath 140 existing London plane trees in the park’s core, called the Bosque, the perennial garden is by design empty in late winter until the spring growth fills in. Spring bulbs can fill this void beautifully. In late October and November, which is prime bulb planting season, waning perennials typically are cut back to make the bulb planting easier. But Oudolf likes perennials (and grasses) that prolong the season—late-flowering hostas, persicarias and cranesbills, for example, all still looking ornamental—and the volunteers at work last week simply planted around them. ‘‘I would say what kind of bulbs I would like to have here and Jacqueline would make the design,’’ said Oudolf. ‘‘I didn’t want big tulips you have to rip out every year.’’ Instead, he told van der Kloet, ‘‘we have to plant bulbs that will come back every year or naturalize so they become more instead of less.’’ Van der Kloet, as tactician, assembled 17 mixtures, mostly of two or three varieties, and then repeated them throughout the 1 1/2-acre Bosque, up to 10 times per mix. She also stipulated groupings of autumn-flowering crocuses, in batches of 850. Typically the mixes were heavy on one variety, though the exact ratios changed. In one mixture, for example, van der Kloet specified one part daffodil Peeping Tom to one part dogtooth violet Pagoda to six parts winter aconite. In another recipe, the ingredients were one part hyacinth White Festival to four parts Pheasant’s Eye daffodil to six parts glory-of-the-snow Blue Giant to 12 parts Turkish glory-of-the-snow.

Frans Roozen, technical director of the Dutch industry’s International Flower Bulb Center, used a broad trowel to cleave the soil and shepherded half a dozen nearby scilla bulbs into the hole before closing it. He didn’t worry about the bulbs landing root side down—he said the only variety that needs planting the right way up is the hyacinth. Haphazard planting may cause some bulbs to bloom a few days later than their neighbours, but in a naturalised drift that isn’t important, he said. His organisation donated the bulbs for the planting. Planting as bulbs fall, van der Kloet conceded, is probably more work than the traditional method of planting in grids.

The Washington Post