This year I am making a garden for a client in California. We are down on the flat, one valley inland from the Pacific. In theory you can grow just about anything here, but we are being careful about our plant choices, because water is in short supply. We are having to plant up the garden at the height of summer because the hardscape has taken longer than we thought. Key trees and shrubs that are already “boxed” (the American equivalent of a large pot) will not be a problem to source, but our choice of perennial material by that time will be limited and we’ll have to rely on annuals until the perennials become available again in the autumn.
Cue a trip to Annie’s Annuals, a nursery that is the Californian equivalent of the Beth Chatto Gardens. It is situated in Richmond on the rough-and-ready industrial outskirts of San Francisco, with chain-link fences dividing off part of a car park. A series of rubble-edged raised beds bursts at the seams with plants that I have never seen before. Beyond, on a sea of raised benches, lies a cornucopia of delights. Nothing is sold in anything more than a 9cm pot and every group of plants has a jaunty label with a photo and a description in Annie’s own words. When you meet her you see where the enthusiastic text came from. She is a total delight and I could have talked with her for hours about her very particular and eclectic tastes.
A good portion of the plants are perennial, but the main interest lies in the power of the annual and its ability to inject new life into a garden. There’s Eriogonum nudum ‘Ella Nelson’s Yellow’, a buckwheat with flowers the colour of clotted cream, and Viola ‘Tiger Eyes’, with its little gold faces striped with black. There’s also Linaria reticulata ‘Flamenco’, with its crimson lip and golden standard, and a host of opium poppies – at least two dozen varieties that had me scrawling in my notebook. As a self-obsessed plantaholic, it was extremely difficult for me not to be able to bring treasure home to the UK.
Now that it is summer here, our UK nurseries are offering young plants for bedding, and many of them are annual or half-hardy perennials. Petunia, tobacco plant, pelargonium and a handful of other staples are available for pumping up the volume and adding long-lasting colour.
Still, I wish we had a nursery such as Annie’s to enthuse us about “unusual” annuals from seed. In the main they are far from difficult: they are often pioneers, the first plants to colonise open ground. Unlike the traditional bedding plants that are grown on so that they are ready at the start of our growing season, many annuals prefer to be sown direct and come quickly to fruition. Cosmos, sunflowers, lacy Orlaya grandiflora and the lacier Ami majus can all be sown direct, even this far into summer. So if you have a gap, plug it with something fast and ready to please.
Get growing
If you are broadcasting annuals, mix the seed into a bowlful of clean compost to make it go further and then rake into the soil to give the seed enough but not too much cover.
Email Dan at dan.pearson@observer.co.uk
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion