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Transplanting bluebells from lawn
Hi,
Novice gardener here needing some help with bluebells!
Bluebells have sprung up on one side of my lawn (only recently moved in) - they add some lovely colour, but the grass underneath them is very patchy. What I'd like to do is keep the bluebells while being able to then repair the lawn.
My original plan was to transplant them to a shady corner of the garden, having prepared the ground. As far as I can tell, now is a good time to do that, but happy to be corrected!
My concern with that is that it could take forever (there are quite a few), that I could kill the bluebells, and if now is a bad time to then put down lawn seed (there will be a lot of bare patches once the bluebells have moved). I'm also not sure if I'm doing it right - I started on a few today, and bulbs looking like the picture attached came up - are these in the right state to be transplanted? For added context, some of the bluebell leaves have started to go yellow.
The alternative that I can see is to simply overseed the lawn, let the bluebells grow each year, tolerate the grass getting longer, and then mow everything once the bluebells have died off (June?), but not sure how sound that is!
Thank you very much for your help!
Novice gardener here needing some help with bluebells!
Bluebells have sprung up on one side of my lawn (only recently moved in) - they add some lovely colour, but the grass underneath them is very patchy. What I'd like to do is keep the bluebells while being able to then repair the lawn.
My original plan was to transplant them to a shady corner of the garden, having prepared the ground. As far as I can tell, now is a good time to do that, but happy to be corrected!
My concern with that is that it could take forever (there are quite a few), that I could kill the bluebells, and if now is a bad time to then put down lawn seed (there will be a lot of bare patches once the bluebells have moved). I'm also not sure if I'm doing it right - I started on a few today, and bulbs looking like the picture attached came up - are these in the right state to be transplanted? For added context, some of the bluebell leaves have started to go yellow.
The alternative that I can see is to simply overseed the lawn, let the bluebells grow each year, tolerate the grass getting longer, and then mow everything once the bluebells have died off (June?), but not sure how sound that is!
Thank you very much for your help!
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It is usually back to looking like a normal lawn within a week or two of cutting it. I have cut it almost immediately the blooms have stopped before, which usually leads to an ok, but not as impressive amount of blooms the following year.
In terms of moving the bluebells, if you wait until they finish flowering and move them in the green they should survive pretty well, they are pretty resilient. If you just want ti as lawn all the time, then if you just mow them from early spring, they you barely even notice they are there until they eventually give up the ghost
It sounds like a waste of time to try and move all of them to one corner of the garden, which saves me plenty of work, so I'm better off making the most of the colour in the Spring (so I'll plant some other bulbs this autumn to add a bit more variety), and then fixing the lawn itself by overseeding after mowing soon (I'll wait for them to start to die off - may as well enjoy the splash of colour for now).
Two stupid questions:
- how can you tell they're Spanish Bluebells?
- and when you say 'finish flowering' - is that when all plants have flowered, or when the flowers start to wilt?
Thanks again!