Garden Centre

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Getting the best from summer bedding plants

Summer bedding plants are those annuals which offer complete and constant billows of colour all summer long. While they appear in nearly all hanging baskets and containers, and grace our municipal parks, they are a wonderful addition to garden borders too, excellent for plugging a gap between a summer and autumn display by providing shots of brilliant colour and dense carpeting growth. Busy Lizzy (impatiens) and begonia semperflorens are both fantastic, doing their duty in tubs and baskets or filling the borders, come rain or shine.

I love petunias, their large trumpet-shaped flowers are always impressive and because they have an immense colour range you can make lively displays for a very low cost. This year they have been outperformed by the impatiens because their large flowers get damaged by rain and have to be deadheaded more often, but even so, they really do look wonderful. All summer bedding needs to be fed and deadheaded regularly but you are rewarded by more flowers than you could shake a stick at!

Labels: begonia, busy lizzie, impatiens, petunias, summer bedding

The All Seasons Gardener at 1:50 PM

---