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 If you forgot to plant your tulips last fall, or just want to jazz up your spring landscape with instant color, do what many professional designers do. Buy pre-potted bulbs at the garden center, supermarket or florist and "plant them out" into your garden or entryway containers. Sneaking potted bulbs into the spring garden is fun - and delightfully naughty! (Not unlike madly cleaning the house before your mother visits, so she thinks it’s always that neat !) A few inexpensive pots of snazzy red tulips, golden daffodils or purple crocus can brighten a dreary spring day. Feeling drab? Having a party? Mother-in-law visiting? Have a friend to surprise? These are great times to perk things up. Consider potted bulbs as springtime’s "costume jewelry" for the yard - an accent here, an accent there - suddenly springtime seems a little closer.
Practical Matters
How-to tips: don’t leave the bulbs in their nursery plastic pot. It’s too small for outdoor use. Here are better options:
Replanting Potted Bulbs Outdoors
- Tip the pot and gently remove the contents from the original plastic pot.
- Replant to achieve a bouquet effect within your own outdoor container.
- When replanting, it’s best to keep grouped plants from individual pots intact - don’t try to separate individual bulb plants to rearrange them. Just slip the whole works out of the nursery pot and replant "as is" with plants in their original in-pot configuration while keeping soil intact. This way you avoid damaging roots which may have grown intertwined within the pot.
- Then mix and match separate pots of flower bulbs within your own containers to achieve the look you want.
Plant as you would annuals, into rich well drained soil.
- Water well.
 Design Matters: Where and Why
Whether you are treating yourself or someone else, potted spring flowers can be used in many ways. Be creative - put them wherever they’ll add a dash of spring color.
Create an "All New Display"
Repot spring-purchased bulbs into your own containers, choosing containers large enough to withstand the exposure of sudden cold snaps.
One set of bulb flowers looks great - pairing several looks even better! Choose all different types or all of a kind (three pots of red tulips, perhaps).
Or mix-and-match different colors or types that will bloom together or in succession (pink tulips, blue grape hyacinths, and yellow daffodils make a nice combination).
Surprise Someone!
Since it’s so fun - and inexpensive - why not surprise a friend or parent. When visiting, bring a pot or two of tulips and a trowel. Before ringing the bell, find a dismally barren spot by the front door and sink the bulb flowers in. (Water them before you go.) Your friend will notice (soon enough!). Surprise flowers catch people happily by surprise!
 For the longest bloom time (and most fun), select potted bulbs with shoots already "up" with fully formed buds but not yet flowering, suggests Frans Roozen, technical director of the International Flower Bulb Center in Hillegom, Holland. "Half the fun is watching the flowers grow taller and get colorful."
A pot of tulips, for example, could grow up and bloom over a period of weeks, even a month, given springtime’s generally cool days and cooler nights," he says. Top candidates for planting out include: tulips, daffodils, little Iris reticulata, crocuses and hyacinths. All are readily available this time of year for use indoors or outdoors as decorative plants.
Acclimate Your Plants - Then Relax
For longest enjoyment, buy potted bulbs when the buds are formed but even fully emerged.
But, then, what if the weather suddenly dips? If weather in your area is still dropping close to freezing, acclimate the potted plants to outdoor weather in a protected but unheated spot for several days before planting outdoors.
Once planted outdoors, the cold or even sudden snows shouldn’t bother them. As with other spring-flowering bulbs (which are generally planted directly into the soil in the fall and overwinter there till the spring), once planted out, potted bulbs will just deal with the weather as it comes!
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