How to solve 10 gardening problems with hardy annuals
Use these cheap and easy growers to bring quick colour and life to the garden
Hardy annuals can be sown directly onto the soil now to provide colourful flowers this summer. Cheap, easy to grow, and generous with their flowers, this group of summerflowering plants can help solve problems in the garden quickly without breaking the bank!
…fill empty gaps in a new garden
If you’ve just started planting a garden from scratch there’ll inevitably be gaps while you wait for your plants to mature and fill the space. Hardy annuals such as calendula, phacelia, amaranthus or cornflowers are really useful for filling gaps with pretty, colourful flowers while you wait. This means that you can have a garden that looks ‘full’ and exciting, even in year one. Sowing seed directly onto the bare soil is the most effective way of creating a big impact in a new garden. You can even have a ‘meadow’ effect if you mix lots of different seeds together and scatter them over a bare patch of soil.
…colour up boring edges
If the edges of your flower beds are looking scruffy, there are plenty of hardy annuals that can make them more interesting. Many are short plants that lend themselves to being shown off around edges where there are no plants in front of them to crowd them out. In full sun and free-draining soil, Californian poppies (eschscholzia) will provide a warm, cheerful edge and a mix such as ‘Jelly Beans’ is full of shades of red, hot pink and orange. Also try poached-egg plants (limnanthes), which smother the ground with lemon-yellow centred white flowers. Both of these plants will self-seed, creating an abundant summer show year after year.
…cheaply fill empty pots
Large, empty containers can be expensive to fill but sowing hardy annual seed on the compost surface is a cheap alternative. Avoid very small pots (use pots at least 25cm/10in) wide and deep, or the flowering season may be short. Good hardy annuals for pots include calendula (pot marigold), which flower from early summer to the frosts if promptly deadheaded. ‘Indian Prince’ shows off warm orange flowers, while ‘Daisy Mix’ is a collection of shades of yellow and orange. Another hardy annual that’ll keep pots looking perky for a long time is Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’. With beautiful leaves in shades of blue, green and silver and hanging dark purple flowers, this is a plant like no other. Growing to 60cm (2ft) tall, it will make an eye-catching feature plant in a container in sun or part shade. Fill pots with equal parts multi-purpose compost and John Innes for a long display and to reduce the need for watering (this mix will hold onto moisture well).
…decorate a wall with flowers
As well as being useful for filling a garden in its early stages, hardy annuals help cover bare walls while you wait for long-term climbers to fill their space. Wigwams of sweet peas can cover an ugly wall, provided it receives at least four hours of sun a day. Make a wigwam of five or seven strong bamboo canes and plant two plants at the base of each. If the wall is sheltered from strong winds and south-facing, rows of sunflowers can do a great screening job, too. Just make sure they don’t cast too much shade on any climbers already in place.
…add more perfume to the garden
Sweet peas are the most obvious hardy annuals with delicious scent (try ‘Matucana’ or ‘Albutt Blue’ for a particularly intense perfume) but also try night-scented stocks (Matthiola bicornis). They’re full of old-fashioned charm with spikes of single, four-petalled flowers, which open at night and release a heady scent that makes a summer’s evening sitting in the garden just that little bit more special. Growing to around 30cm (1ft) tall, they're best grown at the edge of a flower bed or in containers so that their scent can be easily enjoyed.
…give a steady supply of cut flowers
Cutting flowers to bring indoors and brighten up the house is one of the joys of gardening but it can be a balancing act, deciding which flowers to snip off and which ones to leave. You can easily have a few beautiful vases of flowers indoors but nothing left to look at in the garden! Yet because of the speed that hardy annuals grow at, and the ability of some to keep on flowering all summer in a small space, why not grow some exclusively for cutting, then the rest of the garden can be left intact to be enjoyed? Nigella (love-in-a-mist), cosmos, cerinthe and some simple cornflowers sown in rows direct in the soil in a sunny spot can provide you with a steady supply of blooms from June onwards. Arranged together they’ll make a spectacular blue-themed bouquet.
…provide the perfect ingredient for a white garden
Are you trying to make a white garden, bed or border (maybe inspired by Monty Don or the gardens at Sissinghurst) and are looking for inspiration? Lots of hardy annuals will serve as brilliant filler plants for a white-themed area of planting. Try Ammi majus, which flowers all through summer, with spectacular flower heads similar to cow parsley. Sow some now for flowers this year and save seed for autumn as well because autumnsown plants will be bigger. Or try
Gypsophila elegans ‘Covent Garden’, which forms clouds of small, simple, single, white flowers on well-branched stems. It’s a wonderful plant for freshening up and bulking out borders and vases of flowers.
…bust the colour gap
One of the great advantages of growing hardy annuals in the garden is that it’ll help bridge any ‘colour gaps’. It’s easy to rely on just a few old plants to provide summer colour but if they’re having a break from flowering, the garden can easily look a bit ‘green’ all of a sudden in July. Regular sowings of hardy annuals from now until mid-May will ensure a succession of plants are in flower from June to September to take the pressure off the same old plants to perform!
…brighten up your salads
If you’re fed up with boring-looking salads in summer, grow nasturtiums (try the Whirlybird Series which show off its flowers above the leaves) for a steady supply of colourful edible flowers to brighten them up! Also try the edible flowers of calendula.
…keep kids entertained
Hardy annuals are perfect flowers to grow with children and keep them entertained over summer because they grow quickly, are easy to sow and flowers can appear a matter of weeks after sowing. Sweet peas and sunflowers are just the job if they want to grow something big, and you can play a game of count the flowers with very free-flowering plants such as gypsophila and poached egg plants. Hardy annuals will need watering in dry spells, even more so in pots, so there’s just enough maintenance to keep them busy without it becoming a chore (hopefully!).