Bring a blast of summer colour with begonias

BEGONIAS are true beauties. For sheer diversity of flowers and foliage, few other plants can compete.

Among the fab summer bedding types, you may know the compact, low- growing semperflorens range.

They mostly come with carmine pink and scarlet or white blooms, with bright green or bronze-tinted foliage.

Others used to colour-up summer gardens include the fast-growing tuberous

Non-stop and Pin-up hybrids. These are usually raised from easy-to-sow coated seed or bought as pot-ready plants.

Both are good for patio containers and develop tubers in summer that can be lifted in autumn and overwintered indoors. Pin-up holds a gold in the Fleuroselect awards for its earliness, lovely flowers, which have a coloured edge, known as picotee, and ability to perform in all weathers. Bestseller Apricot Shades has big cascading double blooms in apricot and lemon. Begonia seed requires warmth and compost t emperatures of 18C-21C, which can only be reached in a heated propagator.

To have sizeable plants for displays in June that will last until the first frosts, seeds need to be sown between January and March. As the seeds are dust-like, mixing them with dry fine silver sand helps with better distribution.

Large-flowered tuberous varieties are worth the effort. Blooms come in many fanciful forms including single and doubles, with frilled or plain petals and also as pendulous plants, that can cascade from hanging baskets.

Nip off the single and smaller female flowers to allow the showier male blooms to strut their stuff.

Collectable and good in greenhouse or conservatory displays in summer and early autumn are named varieties at blackmore-langdon.com.

Sugar Candy has pink satin-textured blooms up to 20cm in diameter, Apricot Delight has large blooms with serrated petals, and Allan Langdon is cardinal red and free-flowering.

Also look out for Fimbriata Pink, which produces large numbers of very frilly, deep candy-coloured blooms.

Tuberous varieties can be started into growth in March and April. Gently push the tubers, dimple-side up, in pots of compost and water – 15C will get them off to a flying start.

These types of begonias flourish as houseplants as well as in borders.