Fall is time to plan spring garden

In Utah, spring gardens are one of our most welcome treats. After a dark and dreary winter, the spring landscape feels like the Earth is being refreshed and renewed as tulips, daffodils, hyacinths and other spring bulbs burst into color.

Ironically, if you wait until spring to start your garden, you will be sadly disappointed in the outcome. Bulbs must go through a mandatory chilling process to get them to bloom. Plant unchilled bulbs in the spring and the best you can hope for are a few straggly leaves poking through the ground where you expected the blooms to be.

Designing spring flower beds takes time and expertise. When you plant bulbs, you are designing blind — that is, you are planting dried up "stems" that look more like dried onions than healthy bulbs that will make beautiful flowers.

As you plant, you cannot determine the size, the color or the bloom time of the flower. While that might not be serious if you want only a few undetermined colors of tulips to bloom sometime during the spring, you don't have much of a problem.

On the other hand, if you want a flower bed that neighbors stop and take pictures of and then ask you how you made those flowers grow so well, you have to plan your beds more carefully.

While all of the bulbs are spectacular when they bloom, the sad fact is they look bad much longer than they look good. They have somewhat interesting leaves as they grow, but the blooms are only going to look great for a couple of weeks.

You can help your spring garden look good longer by orchestrating your bloom time. Sequence the bloom starts by selecting different kinds of bulbs. The first bulbs to bloom are the snowdrops and crocus, then many others follow. It is important to remember that there are early, mid- and late-season daffodils and a similar range of tulips that provide an extended bloom season.

Tulip varieties now number in the hundreds. They range in size from small-species flowers to large hybrids that you can put your fist inside. Colors are almost endless and include everything except jet black and true blue. Daffodils also have varying sizes and colors, although the chromatic range is not nearly as diverse.

In addition to these bulbs, do not be afraid to add other selections to your mix. These help stagger the bloom times, the colors and the plant heights and textures even more. This practice adds visual interest to the bed.