Jazz Up Your Garden with Annuals You Can Easily Grow from Seed

You know that old saying that “friends don’t let friends grow annuals”? I now ignore that sentiment. Some of the best plants in my garden are annuals, and they are more than worth the effort of growing them every year. Annuals add bold color to my containers and beds, fill in spaces beautifully, and bloom for longer than any coneflower (Echinacea spp. and cvs., Zones 3–9) or phlox (Phlox spp. and cvs., Zones 3–9), so they bridge the flowering gaps between my perennials’ bloom times. But over the last few years as I’ve strolled the ever-more-homogenized aisles of the garden centers in my area, I’ve found myself bored silly, and in sticker shock. I always buy a few standard sweet potato vines (Ipomoeabatatas cvs., annual), calibrachoas (Calibrachoa cvs., annual), and coleus (Plectranthus scutellarioides cvs., Zones 10–11), of course, but if I want something a little different, I grow it from seed.

Annuals do more than just look good in the garden—they also make excellent cut flowers for floral arrangements. When you think of a cutting garden, you might just envision flowers, but foliage makes a perfect filler, sometimes as a backdrop for those flashy flowers and at other times as a main attraction. Here are some bonuses to growing annuals with fancy foliage.

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Growing annuals from seed neither difficult nor expensive. (See tips for growing annuals from seed here). Lots of annuals prefer to be sown directly into garden beds after the last spring frost, but even those that like to be sown indoors a little earlier are not a hassle. In general, annuals germinate faster and more readily than perennials, and they grow quickly without a lot of fuss. The following are the annuals I slip in to jazz things up a bit,