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One of my favourite occupations is sowing seed, especially annuals. I love the immediacy - chuck them in today and mini plants emerge in a week. It's something for almost nothing, with Nature doing all the work. If you give seeds warmth and moisture they will perform. Within 10 to 15 weeks, you can eat or pick from them for months at a stretch. It's a fantastic process, and if you haven't yet discovered this pleasure, what are you waiting for? As a seed fanatic, it is now rare for me, sadly, to find a seed list which gets my blood running. I lose the will to live looking through endless pygmy lobelias, lists of pansies and unnecessarily complicated, new varieties of double cosmos and trailing sweet peas. Most seed catalogues include ever-smaller plants to suit containers and hanging baskets, so something like a snapdragon with long, tall elegant stems, in wonderful velvety, single colours, which 20 years ago you could easily find, have now - as often as not - been reduced to stunted bushy domes, like Shetland ponies all done up for a gymkhana. But there is hope. I've just discovered Derry Watkins' seed list and it is packed with interesting, unusual and beautiful things. Derry really knows and loves plants and will ferret out the very best forms of the things she selects. Take angelicas. Lots of seed lists have Angelica archangelica and a few have A. gigas, but Derry has A. sylvestris 'Purpurea' too, because she knows it keeps its colour in the stem and flowers for twice as long as any other form. The seed will be in good nick too. I've sown Smyrnium perfoliatum, Eryngium giganteum (known as 'Miss Wilmott's Ghost') and angelicas till I'm blue in the face, and they almost never come up. With each of these biennials or triennials, the seed has to be completely fresh to guarantee a good germination rate, yet most sources send it out months or even years old. Not Derry - you pay 50p more per packet of seed, but the seeds she posts will be harvested from her garden and sent out fresh for immediate sowing. Almost every one will then germinate. I could write a book about the new plants I'd like to try, but selecting only six, three flowers and three foliage, these are my favourites: on the flower front, I can't resist her Rudbekia hirta 'Cherokee Sunset'. Annual rudbekias are always incredible performers, but many have boring yellow flowers with papery petals. This one comes in a lovely mix of orange, mahogany and gold. I can't wait to pick and arrange this with dark crimson and orange dahlias. That combination will work perfectly and the flowers should last nearly a fortnight in the vase. Derry's Browallia species is next on my list. This has an incredible blue flower - bright and saturated, like a gentian. It's half-hardy and likes full sun. Its fleshy stems and leaves look like a cross between an impatiens and a balsam, and it looks as if it might flop in a vase, but if you sear the stem ends in boiling water for 30 seconds it should last. Silene armeria 'Electra' is my final must-have flowering plant. I love the brilliant magenta pink, and these small, self-replenishing flowers will give you rivers of colour between late-flowering perennials such as Crocosmia 'Lucifer' and Helenium 'Moerheim Beauty'. When selecting annuals, go for as many foliage plants as you do flowers. Intersperse them with whites, greens and greys and you'll love the colour more. The delicate, large-flowered white umbelifer, Ammi majus, is one of my favourite annuals for growing in combination with black cornflowers or scabious, but I want to try out this chunkier, wild carrot-like version, Ammi visnaga, in Derry's catalogue. I'm also trying Fibigia clypeata, a perennial with silver-white seeds, which look like more glamorous honesty seed pods. Derry says it is excellent for picking. Many of the best foliage plants have acid-green flowers or foliage. Patrinia scabiosifolia is a golden-green flowered plant with flat blooms. I've never grown it from seed and am keen on the idea of scattering it through my the rich-coloured perennials and bulbs in my borders there. It's perennial, so won't flower in its first year, but is spectacular for every year after that.

# posted by henry62119 @ 10:02 AM 0 comments