Like the world's best food, be it sushi or fabulous chocolate-mocha muffins, annual flowers are transient. Sushi lasts for minutes or hours. Choc-mocha muffins are only superlative for a day. Annual flowers bloom for about seven months of the year, then vanish with the frost. Both brilliant tucker and a fabulous display of annuals need hard work- and all of them add enormously to the Happiness Quotient of our lives.
Annual flowers, for you non-gardeners, are the ones planted in spring that bloom all summer - assuming that you feed, weed, water and mulch them; that the ants don't carry off the seeds; the snails don't eat the seedlings; a wallaby doesn't decide to make them a midnight snack and that a late summer hail storm doesn't crush them.
They are worth it.
I'm a latecomer to the world of annuals. I planted bulbs and bushes for summer flowers, timing them so we'd have flowers all year round for vases and to give away. (Any sourpuss smiles if you give them flowers, as long as they don't suffer from hay fever or sinus or a scent allergy.)
Come mid-December we have a host of striped gladioli to fill the vases, and roses too if the possums and wallabies have left us some. But the gladdies aren't spectacular - especially as I pick most of them - and mid-summer roses aren't as magnificent as the rose abundance in mid spring. I needed a gardening friend to point out the obvious: if I wanted year-round glory, I needed to plant summer-blooming annuals in spring, and winter-blooming annuals like Iceland poppies and primulas in autumn.
There's a host of choice for summer annuals. Cosmos come in 'short or medium', and now range from white to the traditional pink and mauve to red as well. They also leave a host of seeds to pop up all by themselves next summer. Sadly, plants that do that can also be called a 'weed' in the wrong place, and we live in the middle of a patch of bush that already has feral goats and blackberry trying to regain a foothold. It doesn't need cosmos too.
Most years I go for spreading petunias as the wallabies don't eat them unless starving. Snails adore them, but only when young - the petunias I mean, not the snails. They come in a host of colours, grow fast, spread to fill a garden bed, just as their name suggests, and can be left to just get on with blooming, apart from water when wilting and a bit of tucker twice a summer or slow release plant food in spring.
Kids adore sunflowers, as the flowers follow the sun around the sky each day, especially the Giant Russian ones, or the smaller fluffy 'Teddy Bears'. I love the smaller 'Autumn Glory' that are streaked red and gold, and have many branches, not just one stem, so can be picked and picked all summer long. The white cockatoos are fond of sunflowers too. Luckily we have a white goshawk who is fond of cockatoo for breakfast or a mid-afternoon snack, so never have trouble for long with cockatoos.
Nasturtiums are fabulous, but only grow fast when it's hot. I'm waiting for global warming to hit a bit harder before I rely on nasturtiums in our climate, but if you grow your veg under a plastic canopy, nasturtiums will be splendid, and again, in traditional yellow, white, orange or red. I prefer the cultivated descendants of native helichrysum, or strawflowers. The native ones grow wild here, in their natural yellow, but have been bred into a multitude of colours for gardeners to enjoy. They love sun, need little rain, and spring up fast after the shortest shower, and bloom a month later. Helichrysum are my kind of flower. They also last for years as dried flowers, a delightful parchment colour, in small vases around the house or in bowls of potpourri.
If I were to list all the possible annuals you might choose, the list would fill this newspaper. Head to the garden centre and see which ones you fall in love with. It will need to be love, not "Mmm, these are pretty" because unless you weed and/or mulch your annual seedlings, you will end up with a lovely garden of weeds or grass. NB: Always edge your garden of annuals, or the grass will invade. Fast.
I did mention that annuals need work. Dinner needs work too. Cooking can be fun, and well as fulfilling. (And filling. Excuse the pun.) Growing annuals can be fulfilling too, the scent of hot soil, the feel of earth against your skin, robins and other small birds following you to see if you expose a tasty worm or beetle larvae. Birds soon learn to recognise a gardener.
This is the time to daydream, choose, plant and tend, and enjoy the glories of annual flowers till winter's frost shrivels them. But then your primulas or Iceland poppies should be beginning to bloom, and your garden will stay glorious.
This week I am:
- Planting more hydrangeas, including the purple pink ones from last year's cuttings.
- Realising that the welcome rain may mean that the grass eaters can't keep up with the 'lawn' growth, and the grasses and groundcovers that make up the green sward near the house may need mowing.
- Possibly planting annuals, but as the dahlias are emerging - and many native helichrysum and erigeron- I might give myself a year off.
- Watching the native finger limes respond to a night's rain with hundreds of flowers only eight hours later.
- Refusing to plant tomatoes till the kale seedlings have emerged - the soil is still too cold, even if we have balmy mornings.
- Rejoicing in more than a hundred kinds of spring blossom, from apples to native orchids in the grass, and on the trees and rocks.
