Has Your Garden Got the Yellow-Leaf Blues?

Most of us suffer from this every spring. First the bulbs peek out of the ground and we are elated. Spring is here. It's time to get gardening!

And then we enjoy the wonderful display of tulips, daffodils, scilla, hyacinths and other spring bulbs that emerge and burst into glorious bloom, and our hearts are gladdened.

And then comes the bad part. The flowers are done, and what you have left are a lot of leaves just standing there not doing much of anything. And then, to add insult to injury, those leaves start to turn yellow. And the worst thing of all is - you must leave that hideous foliage where it is, in all of its ugliness. If you don't, you won't have that heart-gladdening spring again next year. At least not unless you are rich and can afford to treat your bulbs as annuals.

Most of us are not that rich - or, if we are, still cannot bring ourselves to be that wasteful. So instead, we devise ways to hide that yellowing foliage.

Some people are naturally (or unnaturally, depending on how you look at it) tidy. They actually go out to the garden and neatly braid all those yellow leaves. Not only is this an enormous effort, but what do you have when you're done?

Braided ugly yellow leaves, and a lot of strange looks and whispers from your neighbors.

And in the braiding process you have actually hidden about two-thirds of the foliage - which isn't doing it any favors. It's the interaction of sunlight to foliage surface that sends nourishment to the bulb to prepare it for next year's show.

Your best option when it comes to bulb foliage is to find plants that will grow up to gradually cover the ugliness. And since you should have stacks of garden catalogs sitting around waiting for you to pore over them trying to resist temptation, we may as well examine a few of the better "bulb-hiders" that you can plant.Buying plants with a purpose is one way to assuage that guilty feeling we sometimes get when we place our orders. And what better purpose is there than making sure the garden is ever-lovely?

Hostas One of my own standbys is hosta. They go dormant in winter here, so in the fall I know that I can plant bulbs almost right up to their crowns. Then in spring the hosta will start to send up its leaves just as the bulbs start to die back. Pretty soon the hosta has hidden the bulb foliage entirely. One of the best designs using hostas and bulbs that I've seen yet was a half circle shaped bed planted in stripes - a stripe of white late-blooming daffodils, backed by a stripe of green and white variegated hosta, then another stripe of daffs, and so on. When I saw it, the daffodils were blooming and the hostas had emerged enough to fill in the space between them and the bulbs - a lovely symphony of green and white.

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