Annuals are plants that complete their life cycle in one season, while biennials need two seasons, producing leaves in the first year, flowers and seeds in the second.

Please select a plant type for succesful growing and propagation details:

• Cosmos
• Rudbeckia
• Tagetes
• Gazania
• Gypsophila
• Nemesia
• Petunia
• Molucella
• Godetia
• Lobelia
• Lobularia
• Callistephus
• Nigella
• Myosotis
• Convolvulus
• Delphinium
• Lunaria
• Asperula
• Dianthus
• Centaurea
• Antirrhinum
• Lathyrus
• Zinnia
• Salpiglossis
• Salvia
• Eschscholzia
• Ageratum
• Lavatera
• Mentzelia
• Mesembryanthemum

Sometimes the distinctions between types are affected by climate; for example, in cooler zones the perennial antirrinhum is grown as an annual. Sometimes annuals perpetuate themselves, scattering seed that readily germinates where it falls. Love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena) is an annual that provides you with flowers year after year in this way.

Annuals have a multitude of roles to play in the garden. They are particularly valuable when you are starting from scratch and are confronted with bare patches of earth, with a few young shrubs and perennials as yet too small to have much effect. Seeds of annuals sown in the spring will provide a colourful display for the whole of those first summers while more permanent plants are becoming established. This also gives you an opportunity to play with ideas about colours and arrangements of colours within does a palette of soft blues and pinks look near the house? Will a dull corner be brought to with gleaming reds and yellows? Experiments with annuals help you make decisions that have longer-term effects on the overall appearance of your plot.

Even when the basic framework garden, provided by trees, shrubs and perennials, is beginning to take shape, most gardeners like to introduce a fresh note of colour into the summer by using annuals. The fun lies in ringing the changes and trying out different colour combinations and new varieties of plants each year. Both house and garden benefit from this versatility, as many annuals last well as cut flowers. Serious flower arrangers who need a steady supply of plant material may consider devoting a patch of the vegetable garden to their favourites so that they do not have to deplete the garden's display.

Annuals are relatively time-consuming. calling for regular watering, staking in some cases, weeding and dead-heading. The amount of space you allocate them will therefore depend to some extent on the amount of time you have available to devote to them. Another consideration is cost: if you do not raise your own plants from seed, buying them as bedding plants from a garden centre or nursery can prove expensive.

SITING Choose and site carefully to make the most of your purchases, planting them in tight groups to make an impact rather than setting them too far apart just to fill a space. When designing a bed of annuals, the usual common-sense rules apply about placing tallgrowing specimens such as larkspar (Delphinium ajacis), cosmos and lavatera at the back, with clumps of medium height in the centre and dwarfs for edging at the front. Low, spreading plants will help to smother weeds, too. Try to strike a balance between different shapes, including some straight-stemmed showy speci-mens like rudbeckias and some that provide a cloud of delicate colour like gypsophila. Contrast the ragged heads of cornflowers (Centaurea species) with daisylike chrysanthemums and frilly sweet peas.

CONTAINERS Annuals come into their own in the planting up of containers. The bleakest spot can be completely transformed by pots, tubs, window-boxes and hanging baskets spilling over with summer flowers. As well as pelargoniums and impatiens (see Perennials), petunias, marigolds, lobelia and lobularia do well in containers. For successful results it is important to remember that all containers dry out quickly and need regular watering. Larger containers with correspondingly greater amounts of compost retain moisture longer. Wind dries out the compost as quickly as the heat of the sun.

HANGING BASKETS Hanging baskets are an ingenious way of displaying summer-flowering plants and have become very popular. Wire baskets permit you to trail flowerstems through the mesh, but are slightly tricky to plant up. Balance them on a heavy bucket while you work. Line the basket with a small amount of moss which has been soaked in water and wrung out. Cover with a layer of potting compost. Set plants around the edge, carefully pushing the root balls between the wires. Cover with compost and another batch of plants. Continue in this way until the basket is full. Solid plastic containers with a water reservoir incorporated have a flat base which makes planting and maintenance easier.

Annuals grown in containers need a good peatbased compost with a shallow layer of drainage material at the bottom. Soak the compost thoroughly several hours before planting up and do not let it dry out at any time. Within 2-3 weeks the plants will require supplementary feeding, preferably in the form of liquid fertilizer. Dead-head regularly to encourage the flowering.