Beautiful and weird: flowers to grow from seed
If you’re a fan of the weird and uncommon, here are a few flowers from West Coast Seeds you can grow this year. But first, a confession: reviewing this story, apparently, I’m drawn to blue and purple flowers!
Five-petaled one-inch flowers are crisp and white with a purple spot on each petal. Grows 6 to 9 inches tall. These beauties don’t like extreme heat, so if you’re in an area that gets hot summers, put this one in morning sun and afternoon shade.
Pretty and delicate-looking blue-purple blooms top this 2-foot flower. Protruding long stamens reach out from each of the loosely round clusters of smaller flowers.
An under-planted and rewarding annual! Small blue flowers and ferny foliage give you a reward during sunny days and close up when there are clouds. With a maximum height of 18 inches, they are drought tolerant and do well in sandy soil.
This shorter clumping grass is a stunner from mid-summer through fall. It looks like your run-of-the-mill ornamental grass before then, growing to about 10 inches. Then the flowering stalks pink up and start to burst into fuzzy spikes of delight.
Never grown them but always wanted to. The ‘King Size’ series gets to about 3 feet tall and come in a variety of colours, from apricot to red to white to my favourite, blue. A little tricky to grow, but don’t over-water, don’t crowd and don’t pinch and you should be fine.
These weird and wonderful flowers look like something straight from an alien planet. The one on sale at West Coast Seeds is Cleome serrulata. My neighbour grew some Cleome spinosa in hot pink a couple of years ago and we were blown away.
Big mophead double poppies in gorgeous purple! This one is a perennial and really easy to grow. Sadly, each bloom lasts only one day, but the plant keeps on producing them from July through September. The dried seed pods are good-looking too.
It’s hard to resist the charm of these 7-foot-tall creamy pale yellow and multi-branched sunflowers. This is another one to start outside as soon as the frost is gone.
So easy to grow, zinnias are perfect for beginner gardeners and gorgeous for old hats. These ones are chartreuse, an uncommon colour that will make people do a double-take in your garden. The stay a tidy 4 inches high and bloom from summer through to freeze-up.
Like forget-me-nots stretched to 18 inches tall. They grow fast, blooming in the early season. Either cut the seedheads off or accept that they may self-sow with abandon… and enjoy it!
