What approach do you take when planting annuals?
Will you cram all your annuals in or take a more measured approach?
Now’s the time when the plans for summer container displays start coming together. You may be growing plants under cover or eyeing up little beauties in the garden centre, and while it will be late May or early June for most of us before they can safely go outside, do we just cram in the colour or take a more measured approach? If you like yours to reflect your own unique tastes and requirements, here are some ideas to get you thinking.
Rural idyll
Although we’ve lived in a big city for 40 years, I’m a Shropshire lad at heart and this is reflected in the garden with mixed hedges, chickens scratching in an oak-framed barn and rustic containers filled with cottage favourites, such as sunflowers, pot marigolds and nasturtiums. They look more relaxed than regimented rows of African marigolds edged with fibrous-rooted begonias. Or you could sow a wildflower or hardy annual seed mix straight into a roomy, hessian-lined wicker log basket or wooden wheelbarrow. Opportunist containers like large kitchen colanders and galvanised tin baths radiate charm, but for real rustic romance, you can’t beat a saucepan tower. Raid your cupboards, grandad’s shed or look out at car boot fairs for old pans in descending sizes, drill holes for drainage and plant up with hardy dwarf bedders such as double daisies or violas for an instant hit, or French marigolds for June-to-frosts blooming. Surround your pot tower with herbaceous perennials to form a backdrop and the stage is well set.
City slickers
Summer containers for city gardens can be more sophisticated, with the latest stripy petunias from the Crazytunia Series and trailing verbenas or lobelias like two-tone ‘Superstar’ forming a lower storey to dot around plants such as cordylines and cannas.
I was very pleased with my mixture for a non-stop summer display in a rainbow of colours, which included ‘Crazytunia ‘Starlight Blue’. It basked on a sunny deck in a terracotta pot alongside osteospermum ‘Madeira’ Series ‘Crested Yellow’ and ‘Crested Pink’, with lobelia ‘Hot Water Blue’ to spill over the rim. If you want to keep the colour coming, mix in a handful of Westland’s Gro-Sure pelleted feed to the compost when planting up.
Another hot-coloured container I planted up in a green plastic shopping basket had fuchsia ‘Professor Henkel’ at its heart. If you only grow one fuchsia this year, make it a triphylla hybrid variety, like ‘Professor Henkel’. They need more heat to overwinter (min 4C/40F), but reward us with dangling inverted fans of tubular flowers against often bronze leaves, adding an even more exotic flavour. ‘Thalia’ is another all-time star.