Dutch designer liberates bulbs from mass plantings

Whoever authored the phrase "strength in numbers" must have been a flower bulb grower. Gardeners for decades have been planting bulbs in mass beds — at least 50 at a time — to intensify their colors in the otherwise drab surroundings of late winter and early spring.

Garden design evolves, however, and one Dutch landscape architect is acquiring an international following by freeing bulbs from their traditionally crowded and formalized settings. Jacqueline van der Kloet comes up with new tonal and structural combinations throughout the growing season by scattering a few well-chosen bulbs alongside perennials in random layouts.

"Jacqueline's idea of liberating tulips and other bulbs from drifts is radical," said Sally Ferguson, spokeswoman for the Netherlands Flower Bulb Information Center at Danby, Vt. "Perennials become the bones. The underlying tulips, daffodils and others flesh out the early growth with their subtle colors."

Bulbs — tulip bulbs, in particular — were relatively scarce for many years, until the advent of commercial gardens in Holland, where they were mass-produced and began to be widely propagated and distributed. That's when you began to see gardeners planting them by hand by the hundreds in "drifts" or "swaths" to attract and direct the eye from one display to another through the garden.

Recently, however, landscapers have begun designing bulb gardens with a more natural look, emulating, in part, the more solitary look of the bulb's origins in mountainous areas of central Asia.

Mass plantings evolved "to planting bulbs in smaller clumps in perennial gardens, and now it's coming down to planting them wherever you want in flower gardens," said William Miller, a professor at the Cornell University Department of Horticulture.

Van der Kloet's casual arrangements combine the pleasing with the practical. She uses bulbs for soft applications of color while the inter-planted perennials are just beginning to peek up from the ground.

The perennials, particularly broad-leafed varieties, grow quickly enough to helpfully screen the bulbs after they've finished blooming, during the unattractive but necessary dieback period that gives bulbs enough energy to flower again the following spring.

There is nothing calculated about the way van der Kloet shapes her bulb layouts. She mixes the bulbs up by color and variety in wheelbarrows, tosses them onto the ground as she walks, then plants them where they lie.

Bulb size is an exception: She divides large bulbs from small by planting them in layers.