Annuals Just For A Season
THE PERENNIAL GARDEN, IN ITS GLORY, WHEN THE BLOOMS ARE SHOWING OUT.
While this website does focus on Perennial Gardens, you could somewhat think of some annuals as perennials. Afterall, annuals have been around since the beginning of time, in the very first garden when The Creator and The Created were determining what to name everything. Whether the Annual self-seeds, or whether you save seed from your most adored plant, even if it takes going through the painfully laborious task of stratification of the seed to ensure it will light up your world in the following Spring, perpetually Annuals do have their place in the Perennial Garden. I would be remiss to say that it was not so.
I adore my Perennials because they are loyal, coming back to fellowship with me year after year, like a good friend. They require little “digging” nor much cultivation once established in the garden. The pruning is not so bad, because ninety percent of my Perennials are flowering shrubs and trees, and I take the cuttings inside, arrange in vases that my family and friends have gifted over the years, and perk up every room in my home, my office, and my coworkers’ offices with the colorful arrangements in every season. And what I do not gift in happy form, I divide for more “free” plants in scion form.
Flowers are music in nature’s ear.
Annuals, however, are like those friends that were gangbuster buddies for a season in your life, and before long the beauty of what they meant to you in that season is faded and gone. I do enjoy the annuals, don’t get me wrong, they definitely have a purpose. Sometimes to feed us or show us a different side of beauty.
Perennials and Annuals Mix Well in The Perennial Garden
I usually sew my annuals in garden containers or raised beds. And let’s not forget, edibles are included under the Annual category. I love to intermingle a few edibles in my flower containers. Something like these “Sugar Baby” peas, a nice little snack as I water the containers. Their edible flowers are divine in a spring salad. Perhaps a Zucchini or Summer Squash interplanted in the landscape with it’s gigantic kidney shaped crinkle textured leaves with its prickly hairs and attractively happy yellow edible flowers and fruit that the pollinators enjoy immensely. I do enjoy interplanting them among my Perennials. They make a splash, drawing the eye inward, when intermingled in the fabric of your Perennial Garden landscape, like a quilt sewn by the artistic eye of the Quilter.
I recommend that you give the Annual a try, especially edibles. Perennials and Annuals are all good friends in the Perennial Garden. I do favor the Perennials over Annuals in my true tell-all confession, but Annuals do serve us well, if just for a season.
