Best Spring-Blooming Flowers for Early Color

Spring bulbs will not flower without a long cold spell underground first.

Most need 12 to 16 weeks of chilling before they will produce a flower at all, which is why they go in during fall while the soil is still workable and why a bulb planted in February gives leaves and nothing else.

Daffodils go in during October or November across most of the country. Tulips go in later, and in the warmest zones they are refrigerated from the day they are bought until planting in November or even into December.

That refrigerator step is not fussiness. Ground that never gets cold enough for long enough leaves the bulb short of its chilling, and the result on the surface looks exactly like a bulb planted too shallow.

If you are reading this in spring, the fall order is the real answer and there is a shorter-term one further down.

Three to four times as deep as the bulb is wide.

Measure from the base of the bulb rather than the tip, because the base is where the roots come from and it is the depth that has to be right.

Pointed end up. A bulb planted on its side usually still finds its way to the surface and spends energy doing it, which shows up as a smaller flower rather than as no flower.

Shallow planting is the one that costs a season. A bulb near the surface rides every warm spell and cold snap the winter throws at it, and that interrupted chilling is one of the routes to a clump that comes up blind.

Three groups, three different shopping seasons.

That is the part a single trip to a garden center cannot solve, because the three are on sale at different times of year and only one of them is on the shelf when spring arrives.

Daffodil and tulip supply the bulb layers. Bearded iris and peony take over later, while azalea and lilac add shrub-scale color and structure.

A peony planted this fall is a plant you are still enjoying in twenty years, and it will do very little in its first spring. A bag of daffodils planted the same weekend flowers in full five months later.

All three groups are worth having, but they are not substitutes. Mark separate windows for ordering bulbs, planting perennials, and choosing shrubs after checking their mature width.

One variety in quantity gives you a spectacular week and then months of green.

The season is long enough to stack, and the packets already tell you how. Early, mid and late season is printed on almost every one, and it is the field most people skip past on the way to the photograph.

Buying across all three in smaller numbers gives roughly two months of color for the same money as one glorious week.

There is a rescue plan and it is not the same thing.

Then put the fall order on the calendar for July. Ordering while this spring is still fresh in your mind is the version of that plan most likely to happen.

Not while it is green.

Leaves left after the flowers have gone are making the food that becomes next spring's flower, so cutting them in May to tidy the bed quietly shrinks the display a year later.

Deadhead the spent flower as soon as it fades. That stops the plant putting energy into seed, and it does not touch a single leaf.

Leave the leaves sprawling rather than tying them into knots or bundles. Tied foliage shades itself and does the job less well, which is a tidy-looking way of doing the same damage more slowly.

The real fix for the untidiness is planting. Bulbs set among perennials that come up later are hidden by that growth exactly when the foliage starts to go over.

Blind means leaves and no flower stems among them.

It is worth being precise about that, because a clump that is merely late looks similar for two weeks and then flowers, and a blind clump never does.

Four of those five you can act on. The last one you cannot, which is the argument for buying bulbs early in the season rather than cheaply at the end of it.

Fertilizer is not on the list. A blind clump is short of reserves or short of room, and feeding a crowded clump grows more leaves for the same number of flowers.