Jenny Rose Carey in the pink with pink tulips.
A spring garden full of flowers at Keukenhof in the Netherlands.
Spring Gardens Full of Flowers
I am a flower lover. That should not be a surprise to you if you have heard any of my lectures or read my books. Flowers make me happy – especially pink ones. Spring gardens fill me with joy because they are packed with gorgeous blooms and blossoms.
Jenny Rose Carey holding a little blue Scilla flower in her garden at Northview.
There is a moment in spring when there is a sudden outburst of blooms paired with fresh green deciduous leaves. It makes me want to sing. Specifically I feel like singing the song from the 1885 operetta by the British songsters – Gilbert and Sullivan – ‘The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring‘. In my younger years I used to sing in operettas including ‘The Mikado’, from which this song comes. (I was the character called ‘Pitti Sing’).
Delightful Daffodils
One of the most delightful flowers of spring is the daffodil. They are easy to grow, animals don’t tend to eat them, and when they like the conditions in a garden, they will multiply. The fresh yellow, white, and other accent colors are perfect when set against that fresh spring green. The photo below shows a portion of my garden at Northview, in Pennsylvania, that is packed with historic daffodils that were bred prior to 1940. I have a historic house and love old things – myself included! These older daffodils have what I call ‘wayward grace’. I hope to emulate that as I age.
Northview Garden in Pennsylvania – ‘Moon Beds’ in the spring – full of historic daffodils.
Terrific Tulips
Tulips are one of the plants that gardeners lust after. Their vibrant colors, variety of shapes, and knock-your-socks-off displays are a real spring joy. However, tulips are not for every garden because they are a favorite food of deer and other browsing animals. If you cannot grow them in the ground, try them in a container. Choose tulips by season of bloom – early-, mid-, or late-spring, by color, height, and type. I love so many of them that you will have to wait to see what I like in my bulb book (Published September 2025).
So many tulips! A spring scene at the bulb gardens at Keukenhof in the Netherlands.
Spring-Blooming Trees and Shrubs
Andalusia Historic House, Garden, and Arboretum in spring with a view of the Delaware River.
Blooming trees and shrubs are one of my floral highlights. Each woody plant has many blooms and one plant provides a significant impact in the garden. I took the photos above and below at a fantastic Pennsylvania garden called Andalusia Historic House, Gardens, and Arboretum. The garden surrounds a historic house that is located on the banks of the Delaware River. The old garden and trees have that incredible sense of place that is found in one-of-a-kind spaces. Not resting on their laurels, Andalusia is adding new gardens. The one shown below is the updated ‘Green Walk’ designed by garden designer Arabella Lennox-Boyd. The pink dogwoods, Cornus florida, are underplanted with spring-blooming phlox and low-growing white azaleas. Andalusia is a Royal Horticultural Society Partner Garden. In 2024 it was voted as the overseas Partner Garden of the year.
The Green Walk (designed by Arabella Lennox-Boyd) at Andalusia Historic House, Gardens, and Arboretum in Pennsylvania showing pink flowering dogwood trees underplanted with creeping phlox and low-growing white azaleas.
Scented Spring Flowers
Another category of delight in a spring flower garden is scent. The best of the best for this quality are hyacinths. Oh the fragrance that washes through your soul from a group of hyacinths. The photo below was taken at a garden in Limmen, North Holland, that saves old types of spring-blooming bulbous plants. It was founded in 1928 and is called ‘Hortus Bulborum’. If fragrance is important to you then plant a few hyacinth bulbs next autumn.
Planting Spring Flowers in Grass
Gardeners are sometimes bemused by how to produce a floriferous spring garden. I think that flowers should be everywhere. An often overlooked place is to add flowers to your lawn. The example below is from a wonderful garden called ‘Long Barn’ in Kent, England. This garden belonged to Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson before they owned the famous property called Sissinghurst. This photograph shows the orchard underplanted with with the nodding heads of maroon and white snakehead fritillary, Fritillaria meleagris. Small spring-blooming bulbs, daffodils and small flowers, like primroses, are suitable for this method – as long as the grass is not too strong (the gentle shade of the orchard trees reduces the vigor of the turf grass beneath).
Long Barn, Sevenoaks Weald, Kent, England. The spring show of fritillaries beneath apple trees in the orchard.
Mixed Spring Flower Bed
The easiest way to add more spring flowers to your garden is to integrate them among later-blooming flowers in a mixed flower bed. In this way you extend your floral show for more weeks of the year. One of my favorite flower gardens is the Upper Flower Garden at Mount Vernon, Virginia. I love the overhanging shrubs and trees and the beds packed with flowers. The scene below shows a redbud tree, Cercis canadensis, to the left, and old-fashioned red and yellow tulips at the front, and white snowflakes, Leucojum aestivum, behind the tulips.
The Upper Flower Garden at George Washington’s Mount Vernon in Virginia looks fabulous in the spring.
If you look at your garden in spring and wish that there were more flowers take some inspiration from these gardens and add flowers wherever you can find a space. My wish for you is that you will have enough flowers that it makes you feel like singing – tra la la.
Jenny Rose Carey at the floriferous gardens at Keukenhof in the Netherlands – with plenty of pink tulips!
Bye for now Gardening Friends – Happy Spring – Jenny Rose Carey
Leave a Reply