Sow the seeds of success
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F YOU need a quick splash of colour this summer, take a look at this season’s crop of flower seeds. A few packets will produce enough plants to create cracking containers and beautify your borders without costing you a fortune.
Sweet peas are a must. The old-fashioned flowers are great for growing on a trellis or on the patio in large tubs with classy supporting obelisks and they’re superb for cutting.
Two particularly striking varieties I’ve been impressed with are Juanita (Suttons), which produces a mass of brightly bi-coloured flowers in mixed shades with a powerful old-fashioned fragrance and Flying the Flag (Thompson & Morgan), an eye-catching tri-coloured mixture of red, white and blue. It’s ideal for patriotic borders and also very strongly scented, thanks to its old-fashioned parentage.
Both varieties are capable of growing to six feet. Viola Pumpkin Pie is a good value mix. Each packet contains a colour co-ordinated variety of yellow and black flowers, including a real stunner whose yellow flowers have bold black “whiskers” radiating out from the centre.
The violas grow six inches tall and are ideal for pots, small patio tubs and window boxes. You can sow them in spring and summer to give a succession of flowers for every season.
If you want something spectacular to cheer up a tired shrub border or give a natural area a touch of glamour, try the peonyflowered poppy, Papaver paeoniflorum Ooh La La. It looks like an old-fashioned opium poppy, growing to three feet with glossy blue-green foliage but has huge frothy pompoms of petals forming “powder puffs” up to four inches across in an assortment of fabulously girlie colours.
What’s more, unlike most annual flowers you don’t have to mess about sowing, pricking out and planting. It’s the sort of easy-grow hardy annual that actually prefers to be thrown around randomly on prepared soil in sunny bits of borders where you want the plants to flower, as the seedlings don’t take kindly to transplanting. NOTHER real cracker is a two-storey coneflower, Echinacea purpurea Double Decker, which is very different. It has an unusual shuttlecockshaped flower with a ring of bright pink petals below the bossshaped “cone” in the centre.
But what is special about it is that sprouting out of the top is a matching tuft of small petals that give the flower its double deck.
It’s a perennial but sown early enough, you’ll have flowers late this season. But the distinctive two-storey effect will not appear until next year. You pay less for a packet of seeds than a common or garden perennial plant, so it’s worth the wait.
We have not seen the end of the glitzy “party frocks” look for flower beds, not by a long chalk, and these will give you style without costing you an arm and a leg.