Instant Gratification

This garden adventure started with a family trip to see the Metro Vancouver Gardening Society's Annual Spring Flower & Penjing Exhibition held in the Floral Room at VanDusen Botanical Gardens on Feb 15th.  Penjing is Chinese for, "tray plant."  It is a miniature landscape in a tray.  The tree is kept small with pruning and shaped to give the illusion of age.  This show was beautiful and highlighted the hard, patient and dedicated work of some of Vancouver's great ornamental gardeners.  This kind of gardening makes me twitch with impatience!  Their work and dedication to this craft is unbelievable and a joy to see.  Keep your eyes open for up coming events.

Heart Shaped Shrub

Picture By Suzanne

As beautiful as this artful gardening is, and I would like to try it sometime, I do like the instant gratification of bedding plants or in this case, establish spring bulbs.  As we had already made the trip to VanDusen it only made sense to visit the actual garden, something I have yet to do.  Defiantly worth checking out on a regular basis as it is always changing.  I know I'll be going back sooner than later.  On the way out I stopped at that plant shop and picked up three pots of established bulbs.  Iris, Crocuses, and Narcissuses.  You can find these combinations almost anywhere this time of year, from nurseries to small flower shops.  At VanDusen they were $1 cheaper then anywhere else I've seen.

My first step was to remove each set of plants from their pot and lay them in the garden.

Next I carefully separated the bulbs into smaller groups of two or three, or sometimes singles.

Using my trowel I made a shallow hole in the soil.  This is more like pushing soil instead of digging as the soil is nice and loose from turning in the mulch.  It is easy to see how deep the bulbs where in the pot and that is how deep I made its new home.  Now a place the bulb into the hole, and this is the tricky part, green side up!  wink

Next I push the loose soil gently against the stem making sure the bulb is well covers and the step is not too buried.  Roots will grow freely in loose soil, but it is important not to leave air pockets that could likely lead to rot! 

The most common way to plant bulbs, or most other group of the same plant, is to do so in threes, making a triangle shape.  In fact I have been told this is the only way to plant in groups.  I disagree, I think there is a time and place for everything and every method.  As my garden will be mostly layered in rows from tall to short, I put these bulbs in one long row in the front in an almost randomly patttern, but never placing the same plant next to each other.

Simple as that!  Within a couple of days, I was leaving the house in the late morning and noticed an Iris splitting open.  When I got home that afternoon I had this:

And after it started raining most of the bulbs have bloomed.  But then, disaster!  When I woke up this morning, it had snowed last night, only a skiff but snow none the less.  I'm not too worried about the bulbs, its the back row seeds I worry about.