A bed of zinnias will look attractive while the weather’s warm, but the first sign of frost will turn it all into a brown heap. If you want a garden that blooms from spring through autumn, you need to plant a variety of annuals that will tag-team it to give you months of nonstop flowers. All it takes is a little planning.
Choose a palette that complements the season: Warm pinks, reds, oranges and yellows are colors that herald spring.
Photo Credit: ©2000 Dolezal Publishing/Yvonne Williams
The carefree nature of annual plantings is ideally suited to small as well as large settings.
Photo Credit: ©2000 Dolezal Publishing/Yvonne Williams
The trick is to make sure that some of the plants in your garden are getting ready to bloom just as others are fading. This is a relatively simple matter of following your planting of cool-season annuals with a planting of warm-season varieties, then another cool-season planting, which will last well into autumn.
The easiest way to accomplish successive plantings is to replace spent plants with transplants of later-blooming types. You can also do a series of direct sowings. Make sure that you’re sowing seed or planting started plants at the proper time: For example, if you delay planting wallflowers until the weather is hot, they’ll bloom for only a short time (or not at all); on the other hand, avoid jumping the gun and planting zinnias when the soil is too cold (the seeds may rot in the ground, or the seedlings may be shocked by frost). As a rule, cool-season annuals can be sown a month or so before the last frost in your area, ensuring they’ll be well underway by the time you plant warm-season varieties a week or two after the last frost.
If your growing season is short, you can plant annuals a little earlier by putting them in a raised bed, where the soil warms faster. For a truly long-blooming garden, you’ll need to start flowers indoors about two months before the last frost date. Though annuals will get a late start in the cool northern regions, they’ll make up for it by flowering quickly and profusely in the long daylight hours.
If you live in a mild-winter climate, you can have annual flowers year-round. Plant cool-season annuals in autumn for winter blooms. When they begin to flag, replace them with warm-season annuals followed by a planting of heat-resistant varieties if summers in your region tend to be scorching. As autumn returns, you can renew the cycle by planting cool-season annuals again.
There are no ironclad edicts you must obey when you’re designing a garden, but there are a handful of useful guidelines to follow, whether you’re a beginning gardener or experienced green thumb. You just need some basic information to create color schemes, combine different shapes and textures, use plants for their foliage and pick annuals that complement nearby landscape and architectural features.
