Spring Flowering bulbs
Quick! If you hurry you can get to the garden centre in time to take advantage of the sale on spring bulbs. Now normally I'd say buy early and buy quality, but at this time the best will be gone, but the bargains are there.
How do you choose bulbs? Pick the largest. Discard any with soft spots or discolorations. If it isn't firm, don't buy it. Look at the picture of the flower, and read the description. Choose a colour that will complement any other flowers and the colour of nearby structures such as your house or fence. Don't buy huge plants that will be out-of-scale for everything else in your garden unless you have a particular corner for something really spectacular. Some tulips are just humungus so if you're planting lots of them, choose one of the smaller varieties.
What kind of bulbs should I buy? Daffodils do well in most places, and they naturalize (grow additional bulbs) which is a bonus for the thrifty. If your garden is really small try miniature daffodils - just like their big brothers, but dainty and surprisingly tough. The problem with daffodils is that you should not remove the leaves after flowering until they have gone brown. This stores up food in the roots for next year and the baby bulb, but it leaves your garden a bit of a tacky mess.
Tulips come in a gorgeous range of colours and you can choose only one colour or plant a rainbow for variety. Watch the sizes though, if you mix them, you don't want little pink tulips hiding behind big red ones. You have to keep their leaves too, but they die back faster than the daffodils.
One of the first bulbs to flower is the snowdrop - small, quiet and demure in white and green with a delicate perfume. It's not a flower with a lot of pizzazz, but it's tough, it's early and it spreads. They are hardy to Zone 2 and like moist, but well-drained soil. A somewhat similar flower is the Scilla siberica, a delicate bell-shaped blue flower, hardy to Zone 3. Its cousins, the English bluebells, grow to about 15 inches tall but are only hardy to Zone 5. I planted bluebells to remind me of the English woodlands where they grow wild, but they have done very well for me on a steep bank where the soil quality is not something I'm proud of.
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