The City Gardener: For instant colour, just add annuals

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As your spring bulbs fade, annuals are a time-honoured way to continue the colour show

At the risk of sounding immodest, springtime is when my garden looks its very best (partly due to years of over-ordering from the Breck’s bulb catalogue, and planting way too many bulbs each fall).

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Starting with snowdrops and crocuses in late March, followed by sequential waves of daffodils and tulips, and ending with giant red Emperor tulips that last through to late June, my front garden in particular looks pretty darn good, if I say so myself.

However, a garden that depends on bulbs alone for spring colour faces two drawbacks. One is that even if you plant a wide variety of types, each bloom only lasts for a week or two before fading, leaving conspicuous bare spots.

The other is that after the bulb parade ends, you have to put up with dying leaves for the next two or three months if you want to ensure another show-stopping performance next year.

The solution is annuals, and you can start planting them as early as mid-April, if the ground is thawed enough. (That rule about never planting anything before Victoria Day is a myth.)

Many garden plants we call “annuals” in Canada are actually perennials in their native lands, so they can put up with a light frost. If there’s hard frost in the forecast though, you might want to cover them with a bedsheet or a sheet of plastic and hope for the best.

Pansies

You’d have to be pretty hard-hearted not to love pansies. This pretty little plant comes in yellow, violet-blue, white or a combination of any of these, with or without black “faces.” They’re a great way to add instant colour to window boxes, urns, or the fronts of flowerbeds.

I usually buy a whole flat around mid- to late April, and plant them in clumps all through the garden. I plant them about four to six inches apart, which is closer than the experts advise, but it gives you a real show once they start filling in.

For the most prolific flowering, plant pansies in full sun and keep them evenly moist. Keep your secateurs (or your fingernails) handy and deadhead them regularly, as often as daily, and they’ll reward you with sheets of bloom right through to mid-summer.

Ranunculus

Also called “Persian Buttercup” (a misnomer, since they look nothing like buttercups and come from Asia and the Mediterranean, not Persia), ranunculus features thick, almost spherical multi-petalled blooms and comes in a rainbow of colours, sometimes with dark centres.

If they like where you planted them – full sun and evenly moist soil – they’ll bloom non-stop for up to six weeks.

Ranunculus is actually a corm, and if you are ambitious, you can dig them up in the fall and overwinter them. But as with many an over-domesticated horticultural diva, the process is difficult and not always successful, and so most of us just buy new ones each April.

Primula

Primula is another small-scale little jewel of a flower and grows equally well as a houseplant or on the front edges of your garden.

Each plant consists of a rosette-like whorl of leaves with small, colourful clusters of pink, red, yellow, orange, purple or white blooms at the centre. The flowers themselves are equally wide-ranging in shape, from single to double, or even pompoms or tubes.

These little toughies are as easy to grow as they are pretty; all you need to do is deadhead them when the blooms fade and water when it gets hot and dry. In the fall, if your primula is still thriving, you might try lifting it and potting it up, giving it new life as a houseplant.

Impatiens

Another rewarding, easy-care favourite, impatiens is a great way to add colour and light to a shady spot in your garden; just don’t let it dry out.

Available in white with a little pink dot in the centre, they’re also available in pink and red. Plant them in masses about 6” apart; they’ll soon fill in to produce a carpet of colour and cover the remains of dying bulb leaves.

Please feel free to write in with questions, to comment or to share your own city gardening adventures
with Martha. Write to her at marthasgarden07@gmail.com.