This Is the Most Overlooked Spot to Plant Bulbs in Fall for Maximum Spring Color

Traditional lawns may look lush, but they're high-maintenance and offer little habitat for pollinators or soil life. By adding a handful of bulbs this fall, your plain green lawn will erupt into months of color, texture, and life in the spring. Here's how to plant bulbs in your lawn the right way to enjoy years of spring flowers before your grass wakes up after winter.

Where to Add Bulbs to Your Lawn

To ensure your bulbs keep coming back for years to come, pick a spot in your lawn that has good drainage and that receives full to partial sun in late winter and early spring. "To create a long-term planting, bulbs and turf need to coexist in the same space,” explains Jenny Rose Carey in her new book, The Essential Guide to Bulbs. With that in mind, here are a few ideas for where to place bulbs in your lawn:

Patchy areas under trees. If your lawn is struggling right around a tree, try filling in with a few bulbs. Pairing with spring-blooming trees like crabapple, magnolia, or serviceberry creates especially stunning combinations. Most spring bulbs thrive where the deciduous tree canopy lets in enough sunlight for the bulbs to bloom and the soil doesn't stay overly wet.

In wide drifts in open lawn. If your lawn is full and healthy, you’ll want to dig some trenches for the bulbs. Brent Heath, co-owner of Brent and Becky’s Bulbs, suggests planting thickly in wide drifts, even rivers. “Ten bulbs per square foot gives good coverage,” he says.

Along edges of naturalistic areas. Because bulb foliage needs to die back naturally, you'll likely need to hold off on mowing in spring, even if the area begins to look untidy and overgrown to some people. “You have to be tolerant of what most people wouldn’t consider an ideal lawn. I would do it on an edge where it’s more like a meadow,” Heath says.

Wherever you plant bulbs in your lawn, Carey suggests defining the spot with a strong edge of stones or mowing the surrounding area to show intentional design.

Best Bulbs to Plant in Lawns

Start with smaller bulbs like snowdrops, crocus, grape hyacinth, or shorter-growing narcissus, which will die back fastest. Or, experiment with a section of your yard you’re OK with looking a little wilder. If you hold off on mowing even longer, Carey notes, you can keep the flowers coming all spring with later-flowering bulbs like fritillaria, native camassia, and allium.

If critters are an issue in your yard, Heath suggests including daffodils, Crocus tommasinianus, Ipheion uniflorum, and Anemone blanda. These bulbs tend to be less enticing for both digging animals like squirrels, as well as deer and rabbits that may browse on the above-ground parts.

Design Ideas for Using Bulbs in Lawn

When planting bulbs, your design can be as stylized or informal as you like. For an unusual design, consider carving out a maze, a design, or even a word in your lawn made of spring flowers. One year, the Heaths made a happy face out of blue and yellow crocuses, to the delight of younger visitors to the display garden.

For a naturalistic look, Carey recommends taking a looser approach. “Wild-looking spring bulbs look wonderful when they are grown in irregular clusters, as if they had seeded in place naturally,” she says. “Dutch gardeners refer to this lovely spring method of bulbs in grass as stinzenplanten, or stinze planting.”

Heath planted a bulb lawn about three years ago in his Virginia garden. Inspired by plantsman Adrian Bloom, he dug broad swaths in “rivers and sweeps,” planting each bulb about three times deep as its height, covering with compost and a very fine wood mulch to inhibit weeds. “It’s lovely in the spring, they bloom simultaneously.”

Adjusting Your Lawn Care

Most spring bulbs are from Mediterranean “summer-dry” climates and will rot with significant summer watering. It is also important to go easy on the fertilizer, as spring bulbs go dormant over the summer.

For happy bulbs and a healthier lawn, Heath recommends selecting drought-tolerant grass or simply watering less. Lawns watered deeply but less often develop stronger roots than those watered regularly. He also advises delaying mowing or mowing higher (3–4 inches) until bulb foliage is completely spent, which also strengthens grass roots. On a lawn interplanted with bulbs, you should not use preemergent herbicides because they also harm bulbs, he explains.