GARDEN GOAL: MORE SPRING BULBS

Take these five steps now to ensure a better bulb display next spring

- PHYLLIS GRICUS

While others make resolutions at the beginning of the calendar year, spring is the time for gardeners to make a fresh new start. Many of us make it our goal to add more pollinator-friendly, spring-blooming bulbs to our gardens, especially when we see their colorful blooms in neighboring landscapes, contrasted with bare spots in our own.

Spring bulbs can bloom as early as February all the way through mid-June, depending on your zone. They are the most welcome botanical signs of the season for us and early foraging bees. Many flowering bulbs, such as crocus and grape hyacinth, provide nectar resources in early spring.

So, we add "plan for more springblooming bulbs" to the gardening to-do list. But as the season progresses, we face competing priorities in the garden and, well, life. We may only remember our resolution when late summer rolls around-because autumn is the time to plant spring-blooming bulbs.

Therein lies the problem. In a garden's late lushness, it's hard to remember spring's bare spots-or exactly where existing but now dormant bulbs lie. Worse yet, the bulbs you may have been drooling over in the catalogs or online are now sold out. Another spring will come, and the garden will still be without those coveted early blooms.

Spring wouldn't be complete without bulbs-like these blue scilla and creamy Tulipa turkenstanica - but their ephemeral nature makes it easy to forget where they're planted, or even where one meant to plant more.

Does this happen to you, too? It certainly has to me. Garden professional's true confession: While I plan gardens for clients, my own garden was mainly created with unscripted inspiration.