Favorite Cool-Season Annuals: Try Them in Your Garden!

Some annual flowers beg to be planted early. Perhaps the seeds need the chill of early spring weather in order to germinate, or perhaps the flowers need to mature and go to seed before the heat of summer bears down on them. For gardeners with itchy green thumbs (or thumbs of any color), the flowers named here are easy to grow, early to bloom, and lovely to behold.

Calendula officinalis, often called simply "calendula" or "pot marigold," can be planted early. These sunny golden-yellow flowers are frost tolerant. They bloom from spring until a freeze, with a slight pause during intense heat periods in the summer. You'll find many varieties of calendula. This plant is valuable for herbal healing purposes, and is used as a potherb to flavor soups and stews.

Pansies, Viola X wittrockiana, are members of the viola family. There are dozens of varieties of pansies in dozens of colors and color combinations. Pansies bloom in the spring until the weather warms up, then the plants go into a kind of dormant-green state. When temperatures cool down in the fall, pansies will begin blooming again, continuing until a freeze comes. In many areas of North America, fall pansy plants can winter-over to bloom early the following spring.

Papaver sp., or poppy, is another annual flower that will reward you with blooms until the heat of summer arrives. Poppies reseed readily, so if you plant them once, they will usually come up year after year in the same bed. There are a number of lovely poppy varieties in shades of red, orange, pink, purple and white. Poppy seeds are tiny, but they are easy to gather in the pods just before the pods burst if you want to trade seeds with your gardening friends.

Fragrance flowers have a charm all their own. Reseda odorata, or mignonette, was a favorite in Victorian gardens. It is a small plant, about 10 inches high at maturity, with flowers that are not the least bit showy. The blooms are tiny, less than a quarter-inch, held in lightly clustered sprays on drooping stems. Mignonette's perfume is intoxicating. Some gardeners grow this plant in pots that can be set along a wall or near a garden bench so garden visitors can enjoy the fragrance nose-high.

Sweet Annie, Artemisia annua, is another fragrance annual. It will grow up to 6 feet tall, almost like a hedge. When you brush against the foliage or flowers, the plant releases a wonderfully sweet aroma. Sweet Annie adds fragrance to flower arrangements. Historically, sweet Annie has been hung in homes as air freshener; prudent housewives saved dried bundles of sweet Annie, crushing the plants and releasing the aroma to remove stale winter odors from the home. In the garden, sweet Annie can be weedy and may reseed aggressively. Plant it at the back of your garden and allow it to ramble.

One of the earliest aromatic flowering annuals you can plant directly outdoors is sweet peas, Lathyrus odoratus. Doesn't the Latin name conjure up images you can almost smell? Sweet peas need the same growing conditions that garden peas need to thrive. Early, wet, cool soil is perfect for them. Plant sweet peas in a sunny location, give them plenty of room to climb, and they will reward you with such sweet fragrance... both indoors as cut flowers and outdoors in your garden. Plant some sweet peas on a trellis near an open window, and they will perfume your home.

Source:
Personal Experience