I’m really quite simple. I plant flowers and watch them grow… I stay at home and watch the river flow.

George Harrison

Lately, I’ve become interested in an even more abstract style of gardening. I was inspired by the film “Five Seasons: the Gardens of Piet Oudolf”, which is an absolutely gorgeous documentary about the New Perennial gardening movement. I decided I needed to add a meadow in my backyard. While researching what I wanted to put in the meadow, I came across the idea of Stinzenplanten – a gardening technique involving planting bulbs in turf grass (lawn) that bloom as early as February and die back by June.

This technique is very popular in the Netherlands, as it provides hungry spring bees with much-needed nectar giving them nourishment before most perennial flowers come into bloom. I ordered several types of early blooming flowers, including snowdrops, irises, hyacinths, scillas, and daffodils. I gently flipped up bits of my lawn right in front of my long perennial bed and dropped in the tiny bulbs and wished them a happy winter dormancy. Can’t wait to share with you the outcome of this experiment. I have included some not so flattering pictures of my garden so you can appreciate that we all have off garden moments. You can tell from the photo above grass is not my favorite ground cover.