Flowers from Seed
By
Amy McDowell
I turned my nose up at zinnias for years. I
thought they looked gaudy—bright pink, orange, and red pompoms and coarse
foliage dusty with mildew. One year, however, Grandpa McDowell sprinkled a
package of zinnia seeds into his garden. A magnificent swarm of butterflies
hovered over his garden when we visited on the Fourth of July, and that vision
has forever changed my opinion of zinnias.
Raid the seed rack at your local garden
center, and you can broaden the spectrum of delight in your garden. There are
all kinds of annuals that are not offered in plant packs, but are simple to
grow from seed. Annual flowers will not only give your perennial garden
continuous color, but they can give it a full, gushing-with-blooms cottage
garden look.
Flax, cosmos, and nigella (Love in a Mist)
are delicate looking, and you can sprinkle the seed around your perennials to
create drifts of color from one end of the bed to the other. Flax creates a
wispy hint of color. Blue is the most common, but it also comes in bold yellow
and pink. Cosmos blooms are a little more defined in the garden; they come in
pink, red, white, and newer yellow and orange varieties. Nigella has feathery
foliage and pastel blooms in blue and pink.
Datura and cleome are a couple of giant
annual flowers that you can count on reseeding in your garden year after year.
Datura have huge five to eight-inch trumpet blooms in white, lavender, and
yellow. The standard white ones are sweet smelling, kind of like Fruit Loops.
Cleome, sometimes called spider flower, comes in pink, lavender, and white.
Four O’Clocks open their blooms in the
middle of the afternoon, hence their name. They come in terrific pink and
yellow colors, and form a rounded, knee-high mound. They will also reseed and
create large drifts in your garden if you’ll let them.
If you have a hot spot that just bakes in
the sun, try poking a few nasturtium seeds into the ground. The first time I
grew nasturtium, I planted them in a two-foot square patch between the garage,
the driveway, and a sidewalk. It was a southern exposure that was far from the
garden hose, so they got little care, but they thrived.
All of these annual flowers can be sown
directly into the garden in early May. Annual flowers pollinated by bees,
birds, and butterflies in the garden will often lose their boldest colors as
they reseed over the years. When the colors start to look watered down, some
gardeners hoe the seedlings under in the spring and plant new seed. It’s always
delightful to try something new in the garden, and seeds are an inexpensive and
fun way to experiment.
