Bulbs below a lawn

[MinesAPintOfTea]

I've always fancied putting a scattering of crocuses under my lawn to come up and flower in that time when the lawn is otherwise a scraggly damp mess.

We have an area of our lawn where the previous owners badly infilled an old pond and with all the rain the soil has sunk leaving bits of hardcore poking out of the grass. Obviously we need to top up the soil level here and get it resown fairly urgently as we can't have chunks of concrete poking out with a toddler in the family so will be doing this in the next few weeks as soon as we've got the fence back up.

If I bought a load of crocus bulbs now and put them under the new soil, are they likely to flower next spring? I understand that it would be better to do this in the autumn but I'm not going to dig all my new lawn up to put bulbs in...

I think you can get something a bit like an apple corer that you use to bring up a 'tube' of soil/grass then you put your bulb in and put the soil/grass back on top, so you don't have to disturb the whole patch.

Yes that should work fine. I love crocuses in the lawn. You may be stuck with sinking bits where the pond was filled in for quite some time yet.

Yep, I used the apple-corer-bulb-planter-thing! Works a treat. I did it 2 autumn ago and the crocuses have come up lovely last year and this year but not so many of the snow drops which I believe can take a bit longer.

Should be OK to put in now I think; bulbs are pretty forgiving. Also snowdrops and cyclamen can be nice. Remember when they HAVE flowered you have to let the foliage die down before mowing the lawn.

These species ones are nice, not too gaudy:

www.crocus.co.uk/plants/_/crocus-species-mixed-colours/classid.2000017403/

Also fritillaria are quite exotic, but flower later so may not be suitable if you want to mow:

www.crocus.co.uk/plants/_/fritillaria-meleagris/classid.1000000282/

The bulbs are small so it would be no bother to use a trowel to make slits in the grass in autumn and pop them under. The best technique for placing them though is to grab a big handful and throw them all out onto the area in one go - You will get a lovely natural arrangement that you wont get from any other method. You can burry each one where they land.