My Love Affair with Zinnias: Annuals for a Hot-Season Garden

I love to peruse the garden catalogs while in the throes of winter - and the beautiful plant combinations always catch my eye. Most of the catalogs I receive are from places like North Carolina, or Maine. Their "summer" is three days long, and occurs in July. And while I love the beautiful pastels of the northern perennial garden, my Gulf Coast yard is baking by mid-May, and the heat won't abate until mid-October, if I'm lucky.

So I have given up on verbena, delphinium, and alyssum - in my summer garden. These plants will grow well, but need to be planted in the fall, so that they bloom in earliest spring. For the summer garden, I want heat-hardy annuals that blaze with color in our bright, Tropic of Cancer, sunshine.

Annuals are plants that germinate, mature, flower, bear seed, and die within one season. Flowering is the one reason that they are alive, so they are extremely prolific in bloom, and will keep it up throughout the whole summer. While they do have to be replanted each year, they are typically easy to grow from seed, and give you a long, long season of color.

Zinnias are my favorite annual because there are so many forms, and because they are so bright and colorful. The seeds germinate in 3-4 days, and they are in full bloom about a month or two later. There are zinnias for the border and front-of-bed, with smaller flowers and a full, leafy form. There are taller, more spindly zinnias for the full border, with just about unlimited range of colors and shapes. They make long-lasting cut flowers, and will bloom happily throughout the heat and humidity of our coastal summers. What more could anyone ask for?

Besides zinnias, here is a list of annuals that can be seeded now for summer and fall color:

ageratum
hollyhock
Joseph's coat
browallia
annual aster
ornamental peppers
celosia
cleome
coleus
cosmos (yellow)
globe amaranth
sunflower
impatiens (shade)
statice
ice plant
nicotiana
purslane
salvia
scabiosa
marigold
Mexican sunflower
nasturtium
zinnia

Some of these, impatiens and coleus, for example, readily re-seed in my pots and in my garden. Every year, a few of these garden "volunteers" survive the coldest days of winter, tucked up against the house, and burst into bloom long before the ground is warm enough for the seeds to germinate. What a blessing it is to see them shinning in a bed of Japanese holly fern, or peeping out from around the walkway pavers.

Planting some of these seeds now will give you full and colorful beds beginning about May, and lasting through the summer, so get out there, and get busy!

Note: If you saved any of those Easter Lily plants from church last year, they should be getting ready to bloom soon. Put some flowering plant fertilizer on them now, and stand back. The show is spectacular!