HOME DESIGN : Plant Now to Reap a Summer of Color

February is prime time for home gardeners, says Mary Lou Heard, owner of Heard’s Country Gardens in Westminster. Despite brown lawns and bare trees that denote winter even in Orange County gardens, “it’s the countdown to spring,” she said, and time is running out to plan--fearlessly--for the months ahead.

Local nurseries recommend camellias and azaleas, cool-season vegetables and abundant new varieties of summer bulbs for planting now. Annuals such as stock, pansies and Iceland poppies are available for those in need of a quick color fix, and you’ll still find tulips, daffodils and other spring bulbs in pots.

“The choice time to do your planting is right now,” said Heard. It’s also the last moment to take care of anything that hasn’t been cut back or cleaned up, she admonished, and there’s less than a month left to complete soil preparation before you plant. She urges gardeners to be intrepid as well as patient at this stage--you’ll have to be content with imagining bulbs or dormant perennials in bloom.

“These things do look gnarly now,” Heard admitted, “but plants in a state of dormancy or semi-dormancy will wake up in the ground and put down healthy root systems for spring and summer blossoms.”

For bouquet lovers, it’s worth the wait. With perennials such as blue delphinium, stately foxglove, pink puffs of aquilegifolium, gardeners can help themselves to as many flowers as they’d like without denuding the yard, she promised.

Perennials are essential to the English country garden look that many gardeners want now, said Heard. “They have had it with mow-blow-and-go maintenance services,” she said. “Women are longing to get back into old-fashioned, hands-on gardening. They are yearning to get their hands dirty.” And they want flowers--myriads of flowers, she said.

“They’re hooked on flowers. They bring in pictures of a cottage garden and say, ‘I want my garden to look like that.’ We show them how,” she said.

To achieve the natural, slightly overgrown look of an old-fashioned flower garden requires considerable planning. “You can’t just find a hole and plunk in a plant,” Heard said. “When I started the nursery, I thought, ‘If there’s a space, plant it.’ But it doesn’t quite work that way. You need balance, a design. Don’t put a thick plant in front of a wispy one, for instance--give it its own space.”

According to Cristin Fusano, horticultural consultant at Roger’s Gardens in Newport Beach, it’s summer bulbs that deserve more space in Orange County gardens.

“Everyone thinks of gladiolus when they talk about summer bulbs,” she said. But here we can grow florist’s lilies, dahlias the size of dinner plates, tuberous begonias and a host of unusual bulbs that are exotic but easy to grow.

From now through early March, plant lilies such as Stargazer, Casablanca, Voodoo (the gloriosa lily, which climbs to six feet), Amazon and eucomis, or pineapple lily. There are even some fragrant varieties from South Africa.

Taller and fuller than early spring bulbs like tulips and narcissus, they perform best when massed among ferns, planted under trees or at the back of the garden with dahlias or delphiniums.

“They make fabulous cut flowers,” said Fusano, “or you can leave them in pots on the patio.”

Exotic lilies in full bloom can be planted in pots to be seen up close--just outside the window, perhaps--and they’re easily removed from view when flowers start to fade.

Dahlias and tuberous begonias (which are not true bulbs but tubers) have the advantage of coming back every year but may require some extra care.

“Previously, tuberous begonias needed to be along the coast--they need the humidity,” said Fusano. ‘But now there’s a variety for inland heat as well.”

Gardeners willing to fuss a bit also may want to try cymbidiums--the easiest orchids to grow because you can grow them outdoors, she noted. They’re in bloom January through March, with the largest selection available in February.

“And this is the time for greatest selection of camellias and azaleas. Pickings are slim by May, so the sooner you buy them, the longer you can enjoy them,” said Fusano.

She cautioned that azaleas like acid soil--”very few plants thrive and do well in our heavy clay soil”--and recommended plenty of soil amendments. Gardeners should save six inches of top soil and remove the clay a foot deep. It isn’t sufficient just to add peat to the hole for the new plant, she noted--you must amend the whole planting area. This is also the easiest way to save water in drought-prone Southern California, she said. In well-drained soil, gardeners can water once a week for six to seven months out of the year and the rest of the time may need to water only every 10 days or so.

Ironically, the typical Orange County gardener is more likely to use too much water, said Suzy Sakaske, assistant manager of Nurseryland Garden Center in Costa Mesa. “Most of the (home gardener’s) plant problems I see are due to over watering both indoors and out,” she said.

As with many garden problems, the solution is to have a plan, Sakaske said. “We’re such a transient bunch,” she noted, that we don’t often look more than a season ahead. Yet long-range planning is important for both aesthetes and environmentalists. Sakaske pointed out that gardeners who place like plants together--acid-loving ferns and azaleas in one bed, for example--and use drip irrigation instead of overhead sprinklers not only produce healthier plants but conserve water, too.

Planning at this time of year is especially important for vegetable growers. Because Orange County gardeners tend to “take a postage-size lot and surround it with trees,” said Sakaske, it’s often difficult to find space for sun-loving vegetables.

Those who still have a ray of sun, however, should be plotting vegetable gardens and ordering new varieties now, she advised. And for cool-season vegetables, it’s not too soon to begin planting.

“We can get winter vegetables in earlier here than in inland areas where they still may have frost,” Sakaske said. “We have people buying tomatoes now,” and seedlings are available for broccoli, cabbage, lettuces and root crops.

Many vegetables, most herbs and small fruit trees adapt well to containers. This may be the solution to the problem of limited sunlight, as tubs or pots can be moved to a bright spot in the yard or patio.

“Container gardening is very popular now,” said Sakaske. “I love citrus in pots. You’ve got fragrance, fruit and a beautiful evergreen plant.

“But you’ve got to have sun.”