design ideas for planting spring bulbs

Does anyone have any good ideas for planting spring bulbs in your perennial garden? For instance, good plants to plant them next to, to hide the dying foliage. Or good color combinations that have worked for you? I have naturalized most of my crocus and daffodils around the woodland areas at the edge of my yard, but I tend to just stick a bunch of tulips in the perennial garden, and am having trouble designing plantings that are attractive. I like the large groupings you see in parks, but of course to do that, you'd have to plant just annuals after the tulips bloom. Anyone successful in keeping their garden full looking in the spring?

I could use some design ideas myself. The one thing I have done successfully is to plant early tulips and daffs between hostas. The bulbs get enough sun to feed the leaves before the trees that shade the hostas leaf out. The hostas fill in over the bare areas left from the bulbs. Other than that I hope you get a lot of replies to this post. I've got some new perennial mid spring tulips planted in several groupings that I would like to be covered with something when the foliage dies down. I looked closely at a picture of a planting in a White Flower Farm catalogue that was gorgeous, of course. They had planted tulips in groups of sixteen, two colors each of eight bulbs. They were four rows of four, but each color was in a triangle with the triangles making a square. Am I making any sense? It is hard to describe in words. The rows of yellow and red tulips planted together looked like yrrr, yyrr, yryr, yyyr. At WFF it looked stunning. In my yard, who knows! Boy, I hope you get a lot of replies.

Snapple I love your idea of planting them among hostas and I just put in a large hosta bed but now i'm so sad b/c mine is underneath a magnolia tree. :-( so I won't get the benefit of a time when the tree doesn't have leaves.

I'm putting in some narcisus in a "yellow" bed on another corner of my yard, I have yellow flag irises, seedum and gold star esperanza over there and looking for a few others to add in. I also didn't want to edge it just yet so the narcisus are going to be on the edge where the grass can overplant them. I also planted several spots in the edge of another planter so when my blue heather is gone I will have a little something sometime.

I planted tulips behind my daylilies. It worked very well.

Hey Tammy, great idea! I am slapping my forehead and going Duh! Nice planting you have there.

Mary

cindyeo--I am always looking for good bulb combinations and perennials to go with them and sometimes the search makes me tear my hair out! I can never get the timing right!

But I did find this thread from last spring and found it useful to review for making up bulb combinations with 'the little blue bulbs'. Maybe you will too.

I put my bulbs in with forget-me-nots. It's the shoes and socks plant I use in all my beds. By the time the forget-me-nots are taller and going full strength, the bulbs have died back. A few primroses in there look nice too. I second the daylillies. That's a really great combination.
Ive also tried it with peonies and perrenial snapdragons. Both begin really putting on foliage about the time the bulbs are dying back.

Are there different kinds of forget-me-nots? Because I've always heard they were early blooming plants, but mine don't bloom until the middle of the summer. They send up taller flower spikes than in renwings' picture. They reseed themselves every year, so I know I'm not planting them too late. This picture was taken on 9/5/05, it's not a great picture, but as you can see from the date, they are still blooming in September.

Mine bloom once and die back, but since they are constantly reseeding themselves and the weather here is quite mild most of the time, they are usually always flowering. I have pink and blue ones and they are taller in the full sun. I'm not sure why yours wait so long.