Bedding Flower Annuals
Web-Gardeners who tend a roses, perennials, and foliage type of garden still have a duty and responsibility to promote the flowery bedding annual. Indeed, those pretty patterns of colour can be exceedingly cheery.
Bedding Annuals
But first, let's get one thing clear. There is absolutely no sensible connection between bedding annuals and the dentist. Teeth, after all, are supposed to be totally hardy perennials, growing happily in their healthy garden of gums.
Red, White and Blue Garden
Apres Dentist...
But yesterday I was driving home after yet another visit to the Moosey dentist, lost in a gloomy thicket of potential titanium implants - the cost of a complete garden makeover, or a kitset Victorian summer-house. Aargh!
Annual Flower Display
My route passed several annual bedding displays, with flowers shouting at me from the road-side. The colours were noisy and bright, with Salvias, Petunias, Begonias... Look at meeeee! Red, white and blue - Geraniums, Alyssum, Lobelias...
I don't grow this type of display in my own garden, and normally I would whoosh by. Normally my head would be full of the subtle joys of the Moosey Garden - new plans, new designs, new paths, new borders, and so on. But dentists have an inbuilt curbing effect on a gardener's dreams - not to mention those magical discretionary dollars. Aargh!
Hmm... Molar Marigolds? Incisor Impatiens? I decided to stop and take some cheer-up photographs. And it worked!
A Mass of Marigolds
Actually the Salvias (both purple and red) looked gorgeous, and I should grow them for my summer garden. I can take or leave the little white Begonias, but I must grow more blue Lobelias. And those little Diascias! About as short-lived as the Moosey molars (aargh!) but definitely prettier.
Pretty Diascia
I've always loved Marigolds - initially as a rebellion against so-called 'good taste', later as companion plants in my vegetable garden. I love a bright, uncompromising yellow or orange.
Plant-By-Numbers
I might enjoy a plant-by-numbers composition. There'd be subtle symmetries and balances which my ex-mathematician's soul could feed on. And there'd be lots of arithmetic - let's see, 10 trays of blue pansies at 12 dollars per tray, containing 25 plants, with 2 dollars refunded when the tray is returned, to be planted in 5 triangular shapes, base 80 centimetres, vertical height 45, density 36 pansies per square meter...
Purple, White and Blue Flowers
Ha! Maybe I can plant some bedding annuals for next summer - perhaps by my front gates, in a symbolic planting pattern. A nice little project to get my teeth into... Aargh!