You don’t have to spend a fortune to have a garden overflowing with flowers. Whether started from seed or from transplants, once in the garden, self-sowing annual, biennial and perennial flowers are yours forever. To decide whether this is a good idea for you, ask yourself what kind of a gardener you are. Unbridled serendipity promises to alarm formal gardeners and control freaks. If you’re uncomfortable with chaos, avoid this group of flowers or diligently deadhead, so seedheads don’t have a chance to form.
For laissez-faire gardeners like myself, self-sowing flowers offer real advantages beyond economy. Of the hundreds of seeds produced, only those that find themselves in just the right place germinate and thrive. Flowers that result need less coddling than transplanted counterparts.
Which brings up the downside of self-sowers. Many of these flowers aren’t all that picky about where they grow. If they like your soil, sun and watering regimen, many will invade every square inch of your property. I cringe every time I take a walk and notice red orach and other escapees from my garden in yards and sidewalk cracks a block from my house.
None of these are noxious weeds—their inability to survive without some additional water beyond what nature provides keeps them out of wild areas. But given a patch of cultivated soil, most happily snuggle up to junipers and Manhattan euonymus.
Some are too rambunctious even for my tolerance for clutter. Biennials viper’s bugloss (Echium vulgare) and clary sage (Salvia sclarea) have been banished to the back forty, where nothing else will grow. Now, every spring I face the thankless task of pulling out hundreds of these from where I no longer want them to grow. Still, in a dry garden, removing what you don’t want is often less work than getting new transplants to survive.
The following plants routinely self-sow in my garden:
Annuals: annual sunflower, bachelor’s buttons, California poppy, datura, larkspur, Mexican prickly poppy, morning glory, nigella, scarlet pimpernel, sweet William and true annual poppies.
Biennials (flowers that complete their life cycle in two years): Armenian poppy, cape forget-me-not, clary sage, Dracocephalum nutans, echium, Eryngium giganteum, feverfew, gilia, Grecian foxglove, hollyhock, honesty, horned poppy, ipomopsis, mole plant, moon carrot, pot marigold, Queen Anne’s lace, rose campion, snow daisy, Tahoka daisy, verbascum, Verbena bonariensis, wallflower and yellow fumitory.
Perennials: anchusa, birdfoot violet, bleeding hearts, blue flax, butterfly weed, catmint, cupid’s dart, cushion spurge, dwarf soapwort, erodium, gaura, German statice globe thistle, golden columbine, golden flax, Greek valerian, Knautia macedonica, lavender, Liatris punctata,Linaria purpurea, mallows, meadowrue, mountain basket-of-gold, pasqueflower, primula, sea holly, sea lavender, Siberian forget-me-not, spiderwort, wild petunia, winecups and Wichita Mountain goldenrod.
Bulbs: chionodoxa, crocus, eremurus, grape hyacinth, ornamental onion, Puschkinia, scilla and many species of tulips.
Herbs and edibles: borage, pot marigold and bronze fennel.
Marcia Tatroe’s most recent book is “Cutting Edge Gardening in the Intermountain West” ($29.95, Johnson Books). E-mail her at mtatroe@q.com
