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Are Annuals Outdated?

© Carol Wallace

The Victorians loved annuals. Equipped with greenhouses and lots of live-in gardeners who could constantly tend new crops of flowers and rush to replace any that seemed to wither in the garden, they invented bedding schemes that inspire shudders in most modern gardeners. Floral clocks, flags of red and white petunias and blue ageratum, even Persian carpets. The scientific-minded could create a sundial of flowers with a topiary shrub to cast the telling shadow on hours marked in marigolds.

These bedding schemes were both expensive and labor intensive. The results were so regimented and contrived as to take the idea of nature out of the garden setting. Every winter the mangled and frost-bitten remains had to be composted, leaving the gardener a less-than-inspiring view of a patch of bare earth, and the certain knowledge that next spring the entire garden would have to be planted from scratch again.

Not surprisingly, the bedding scheme -- and the annual flower -- fell out of favor. But the memory of the bedding scheme is why some gardeners shudder if someone talks about "painting with plants."

The creative energies formerly poured into creating interesting bedding schemes were replaced by a newfound interest in the perennial. While perennials don't often offer summer-long flowering, they do have several advantages. The most important is that they come back year after year if properly cared for. The well planted and designed perennial bed involved a lot less labor than the bedding scheme, and almost eliminated the need for a greenhouse, at least for the ornamental gardener. Instead of constantly pinching and planting and replacing, all the perennial gardener needed to do was deadhead and divide.

If there was obvious wisdom in making the switch to the more economical and low-maintenance perennial bed there was also folly. Perennial gardeners soon became smug ones. Coming across a bed overflowing with the cheerful colors of annuals, they could not prevent their nostrils from dilating in an ill-disguised sniff. Annuals are outmoded, they would preach. The sophisticated gardener doesn't use them.

This message survives today. Last year a popular gardening catalog came forth with this message emblazoned on its cover: "Real Gardeners Don't Grow Annuals."

I guess I'm not a real gardener then.

I love perennials. I grow hundreds of them. Perennials and shrubs are the backbone of my garden scheme. But into any garden a few bare spots must open. A plant dies. Another fails to prosper and doesn't fill its allotted space. A third gets moved, because it outgrows its boundaries, and a fourth gets composted because it is becoming obnoxiously vigorous. Yet another gets divided and leaves bare earth around it.

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