HARTWICK SEMINARY - Three horticultural designers from Cooperstown will be helping gardeners across the country plant their spring bulbs this fall.

Gary Barnum, Tony Costanzo and Timothy Gill, the design team from Theatrum Botanicum, were in Boston last month at the studios of WGBH to film two segments for the PBS television show "The Victory Garden."

The trio focused on planting spring bulbs for both forcing and cutting.

"Bulbs offer unlimited possbilities," Barnum said. "You're limited only by your imagination."

Barnum said bulbs can be planted to provide bloom from mid-February with early crocuses and proceed through May with narcisus, tulips and alliums.

What took the better part of a day to set up and film will be boiled down to seven-and-a-half miuntes of air time and show gardeners not only how to plant the bulbs, but also how to choose bloom colors and sequences that will fit with the existing plantings.

When planting tulips, the bulbs are set on three-and -a-half inch centers to provide enough blooms for cutting and still have a beautiful outdoor display. But when he it comes to narciscus, the bulbs are crowded tighter together, or "cheek to jowl," as Barnum puts it.

The segment is expected to air this Saturday, Oct. 19, and viewers should check local listing for the exact time.

The television show comes at the end of a sucessful first year for Theatrum Botanicum, Barnum said.

The name for the business comes from the title of one of John Parkinson's illustrated florilegiums - an English botanical work from 1640.

"The name Theatrum Botanicum is a reminder that the new, to endure, must be solidly placed on a continuum which has its roots deep in the classical past," Barnum said. "We want to give everyday life a pervasive sense of theater, a sense of the beautiful. We are at work on a horticultural aesthetic that can evoke the same emotions that the best theater can - a magnified sense of awe and wonder at the complexity and richness of life."

Their first year also included providing the design for a major fundraiser at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., and participation in the Decorator's Fair in Manhattan.

While they design settings for wedding, parties and galas, they also work on landscape and garden design, expert pruning and trimming, sculptural ironwork for the garden, custom orders such as wreaths, doorway urns or tabletop pieces which may be purchased or rented and for those clients who are interested in more instant gratification, there is specimen large tree transplanting.

This year they planted three tractor-trailer loads of trees with a four -and-a-half inch or greater caliper, or trunk diameter, including one which was six-and-a-half inches.

If you go much beyond that, Costanzo said, it takes a large crane to load and unload the trees because of their size and weight.

"We're finding more and more demand for the large trees," Barnum said, adding that they are currently taking orders for large tree transplanting for the 2003 landscape season.

Christmas is traditionally a time for wreaths and the design team is well-known throughout the area for the elegant pieces they have created over the years that grace the front doors of some of the village's stately homes.

The team is busy now assembling the wreaths, or medallions, to meet the orders that are still coming in for this holiday season. The assemblages are part of the signature look associated the design studio and sometimes employ thousands of dried fruits, pods and leaves.

The area's climate and landscape provide inspriation for much of the designers' work.

"Cooperstown is naturally beautiful and, I think, naturally inspiring. It's a moody landscape and is always changing. It's really wonderful," Barnum said.

But working in this area is about more than a beautiful landscape, it is also the clients with whom Theatrum Botanicum works. Cooperstown attracts some interesting people and Barnum counts their clients among them.

"Most have been interested in both horticulture and design. It's been wonderful working with those people," he added.

"What makes our work different," he said, is that we are real gardeners and love plants and the natural world. At the same time we are designers and designing with the natural world as your inspriation allows a signature look.

Theatrum Botanicum is located on state Route 28, in the Greystone Building in Hartwick Seminary, 607-547-5110.