My 80-year-old Mom from Winnipeg is here for a visit and it is always fun to have her stay with us.
Every morning she gets up and looks out our front window onto the garden and exclaims "Oh, it's so green here, it's like another world, so beautiful!"
There are various themes of this exclamation as we drive through Squamish as she admires the rhododendrons, azaleas, Japanese maples and flowering plums and cherries that don't grow back in the prairies.
Although they lack our wide range of growing zones and don't have the evergreen material we boast here, their growing season is short, intense, and beautiful. One of the ways they incorporate major colour swaths quickly is with annuals.
Annuals are flowers that grow, live, flower, set seed and die all in one season. They make the most of their time with a gorgeous display.
They do not come back year after year like perennials, but they certainly make for great eye candy for many gardeners.
Savvy annual buyers will not be swayed by the colourful displays in stores and nurseries at the moment. The best time to plant annuals is after any chance of frost - usually mid-May is reliable in these parts.
I rarely purchase annuals as we are a little top heavy with plants, trees and shrubs at our home. But these workhorses of the garden can fill an important and artistic role.
Try planting them in and around the yellow and dying foliage of bulbs, and to fill in holes between perennials, which are slow to fill out.
Annuals and perennials look fantastic together, and annuals can really hold a bed together while perennials are still growing to maturity.
The key to success with annuals is deadheading. This involves cutting or pinching off the old blooms to encourage new growth and more flowers.
Feeding annuals is always recommended too as they need a lot of energy to put on a great show for one season. If you have annuals in pots, window boxes or baskets you will have great success if you use a slow release fertilizer.
The other neat thing about annuals is that you can usually buy them partially in bloom so that you can get a visual of the actual colour of the flower and can artistically arrange them based on palettes.
Annuals grow quickly as they are in a rush to make seeds so you will be guaranteed a lovely show in a few short weeks.
Try tucking a few annuals into your veggies garden for some visual deliciousness, and challenge yourself to move away from petunias, impatiens and geraniums.
Try something new. I dare you.
