Garden Tips & Resources

Archive for the ‘Annuals’ Category

Flowers are a great way to accent your home’s landscaping. They have a knack for complementing all of the previous flora which you or previous owners may have planted in your front or back yard with their elegant beauty and timeless forms.

Unfortunately for most amateur gardeners, flowering plants are both a blessing and a curse as they provide unsurpassed beauty and style but generally require lots of care and maintenance if you want them to look spectacular throughout the year.

While this is true for most flowering plants, there are a variety of more durable flowers which have been shown to survive just about anything with their beautiful flowers still intact. These amazing plants are commonly known as sedum, and one variety in particular – autumn fire sedum is an incredibly durable plant which produces flowers the colors of which you could have only dreamed of.

One of the reasons that autumn fire sedum plants are so incredibly durable is because they are constructed like tanks of the plant world. With their long, thick and robust stems they are able to support the weight of their big, beautiful flowers – a feat that most other plant species cannot readily undertake.

As long as you can provide your autumn fire sedum plants with the proper amount of drainage and a healthy dose of water from time to time, you will have an amazing garden that can stand up to even the harshest abuse.

While this astounding durability is true for nearly all varieties of sedum, the autumn fire sedum is a breed apart from the rest. Taking its name from the time it blooms (August to October) and the brilliant colors of its blossoms, autumn fire sedum is surely a plant not to be missed with its lavish oranges, yellows and reds. These bronze and coppery flowers are well matched with the grayish green leaves of the plant itself, lending it to be a must have plant for any home garden.

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Annuals provide more color, more quickly than any other group of flowering plants. They definitely give you the biggest “bang” for your color buck! Moreover, they give you planting choices as well: you can plant them from seed or from seedling six packs or as already established plants in four, six or eight inch pots. 

The life cycle of annuals is to sprout from seed, flower, set seed, and die within one growing season. Many flowers, vegetables, and herbs are planted as annuals, either seeded or set out in the spring to grow during the summer and die when frost hits.

Some annuals will reseed themselves, thereby providing several years of colorful viewing pleasure for minimal expenditure of effort. Annuals come in virtually every color, height, and leaf texture there is; they are especially showy in masses of solid or mixed colors, but also appealing when planted in small groups or as colorful accent plants in perennial borders.

Many annuals are also well suited for container gardens on porches, roof gardens, terraces, patios and decks, while some annual vines may be grown on fences, arbors, porch rails, or trellises.

Here are some planting suggestions that will add annual color to your garden:

To make your garden glow with yellow and orange shades, choose marigolds, nasturtiums, mimulus, celosia, chrysanthemums, California poppies, or sunflowers.

For pink color accents, include some wax begonias, snapdragons, cosmos, dianthus, impatiens, portulaca or petunias.

Blue choices include ageratum, browallia, heliotrope, morning glories, lobelia, forget-me-nots and torenia.

The best white annuals are alyssum, crepis, gypsophilia, nicotiana and mullien.

For gorgeous foliage annuals, choose amaranthus, ornamental cabbage, coleus, euphorbia or castor oil plant.

Though annuals are less costly than perennials, they do require the same high level of soil preparation, fertilizing, watering and weeding as their more permanent plant relatives. Most annuals hail from semiarid climates and require full sunshine to thrive; some, however, came originally from woodland environs and do well in shadier sites.

Annuals that need full sun, such as periwinkle and marigold, grow and flower best when they receive at least 4 to 6 hours of direct sunlight each day, while woodland-based species perform best under partial to heavy shade. When planting annuals, avoid heavy soils and areas where water can collect and become waterlogged as well as areas close to large trees and shrubs with thirsty feeder roots.

Most gardeners add annual flowers to their gardens, window boxes and containers to ensure that there is obvious color in the garden all season long. It also is ideal for filling ‘gap’ times when your perennials are not in bloom, such as early summer and late fall. There are so many varieties of annual blooms that the only limits to what you can include in your garden is restricted by your imagination!

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