Beware, new gardeners, the folly of bedding out too early

I am aiming this column at wise and foolish virgins. Do not disconnect, as if those days were long past in your life. I am thinking of virgin gardeners, of whom there are masses more since the lockdowns began. My topic is bedding out, which ought to interest newcomers and veterans alike.

In mid May, foolish new gardeners buy, or have already bought, their bedding plants for this summer. The folly is to plant them out when a sharp frost is still possible. Last year we had a vicious one this very weekend.

I usually reserve a column on this subject until the end of May when country bedding-out makes sense. However, in London and warm cities
I often see folly rewarded, pots and boxes filled with petunias and trailing lobelias and flowering happily from early May onwards.

“If they do it and get away with it, why cannot I?”: it is a bad argument, because herd instincts do not guarantee herd immunity. Accidents happen to virgins as well as veterans.

Note I said “plant out”, not “buy in”. This year the welcome new wave of gardeners has been buying almost anything a nursery, online site or centre can offer, weeks before the wise planting season is due. If you wait wisely, the foolish will already have bought up the stock.

I have just had an update from an old favourite, Allwoods nursery in Sussex (allwoods.net “where plants come first”). Good pelargoniums and bedding plants now balance its list of hardy pinks and a few carnations, but in lockdown it furloughed its staff down to three. They worked hard to pack and dispatch 1,600 detailed orders in March, but ended with another 2,700 still to be met.

Delivery dates had to be extended from 28 to 42 days and to complicate planning, cold dim days then inhibited early growth on some of the best-loved pelargoniums. Extra stock has only recently been rooted: Allwoods is an example of the delays, shortages and scramble which have beset smaller nurseries, doing their best with homegrown bedding plants.

Retaining my wisdom, I have been buying up, not planting ahead. My folly is rather different, a chronic inability to fix on plants that look good for months in my pots and then to hang on to them during the winter. Last year I persisted with hardy penstemons, which flower early in their second year of service and then look blank and untidy for the rest of the summer.

I had also hung on to the deep blue Salvia patens, a lovely colour, but its major season is only a few weeks in July to early August. A tall red perennial Lobelia cardinalis Bees Flame is slow to flower too.

In a bout of first lockdown mania, I ordered two plants of the white-flowered Brugmansia, or Angels Trumpet, online. They arrived as little rooted cuttings at a cruel price of £6 each, with delivery, and were single-flowered, less than half as beautiful as the double-flowered ones, which exhale such scent at night.

I have turned the penstemons and the lobelia out into the garden and lost the blue Salvia patens in this year’s frost. I have chucked the brugmansia as it is such a second best. To replace them I have been to the nearest garden centre and imagined myself guiding those bedding out for the first time.

My folly is a chronic inability to fix on plants that look good for months in my pots and then to hang on to them during winter

In their innocence they might not gasp at the prices: £4.60 for one Nicotiana sylvestris in a litre pot, an annual which lasts for only six more months and which can be raised by the 50 from a packet of seed costing £2.

White marguerite daisies, or argyranthemums, are ever so Bridgerton, but the real versions, not the CGI replicas, are on offer at an amazing £16 per pot, already in flower. A mere £28 will buy a mini-standard plant of a yellow one on a stem about 2ft high. It is incredibly easy to limit a small plant of a marguerite to one stem and grow it up a cane, trimming off all the side shoots until the stem has the height you want.

For £6.90 you can have one little plant of a pretty convolvulus called sabatius Neon Blue, which is actually pale lilac-violet. These half-hardy convolvulus root so easily from cuttings that you do not need plants of this size. Virgins need to know about propagation, but if not, Sarah Raven has been offering five already-rooted cuttings of the excellent pale blue Convolvulus mauritanicus for £7.50 (sarahraven.com).

As for sweet peas, if you pay £20 for a basket of mini sweet peas, you get an arched little wicker basket on which the sweet-pea plants, all six of them, can be tied, at least initially. For £1.95 you could buy and germinate an entire packet of sweet-pea seed, giving you about 60 plants to flower this autumn.

What about a mix of pop-up plants called Bollywood? For £18 in a basket you get a rose-pink diascia that will be over by August, a Verbena Lascar Hot Rose that will clash with it, a fragile yellow-flowered calibrachoa that will break if the cat sits in it and a white-edged yellow-flowered Bidens Golden Eye that will swamp everything else. Make your own Bollywood,
I say, and as a general rule remember that blue in a bedding plant is usually lilac or purple-violet and gold is not always golden.

I would struggle to buy just one Swan River Daisy, a Brachycome, for £3.50, even if it was a selected colour called Hot Candy. These daisies are so easy by the 100 from seed, even if sown now. Instead I would buy small rooted plants of geraniums in trays, preferably the pink double-flowered Apple Blossom and a single-flowered white.

I would edge them with ordinary yellow bidens and some white bacopa, resisting the lazy urge to order the latter two online. Almost everywhere the only plants of them on offer are in pots, starting at £9.99 for three, two more than I want. At the checkout a delivery charge of £4.99 will be added for most UK addresses and the plants will not be available until about June 25. I would rather buy, admittedly after burning petrol, when I can drive and see exactly what I am getting.

I always buy pre-grown petunias as I have a poor record with them from seed. Dark violet-blues are excellent, even with some plain reds and contrasting pale yellows and whites. My dud award of the year goes to the petunia being marketed as Wicked Purple. Its flower is a streaky rose-purple edged with an absurd rim of green-white. Any petunia with the word vein or streak in its name should be avoided. Go for clear colours or centrally striped ones only.

I am no fan of purple-brown leaves or small-flowered fibrous rooted begonias but I have just bought on sight a box of fibrous begonias called Dark Leaf White because I could envisage them with a pink-centred, white
edged verbena called Lanai Pink Twister, also carried off at £3.25 for a box of six. What was I doing, I now wonder, but I thought I saw impact in the combination. Even wisdom can be seduced.

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