Hardy cool season flowers tough enough for an Irish spring

And these plants should start flowering from late March or April onwards, which is good news if you could do with a bit of colour after a long, dull and cold winter.

There’s so many different plants you can grow now and it’s handy to be able to differentiate the tough nuts from the tender ones. Gardening terms like hardy, half-hardy, tender, perennial, biennial and annual can be confusing. To put it very simply, annual flowers germinate grow and flower in one year and then they die, whereas biennials germinate one year and flower the next then die. Perennials are usually slower growing but come back year after year. Hardy plants are those which can withstand the cold weather, even some light frosts. Half-hardy means they can tolerate some cold weather but not frosts. Tender plants are those which struggle in cold climes but thrive in the warmth of the summer. There’s a whole lot more to it but that’s just a general overview.

A resurgence in interest in sowing cold hardy annuals for over-wintering and into early spring has been led in the US by garden farmer Lisa Mason Ziegler, author of the popular book ‘Cool Flowers’, which has become something of a go-to for numerous farmers and gardeners in the US and elsewhere to prolong their growing and/ or selling season. You can find Lisa at ‘The Gardener’s Workshop’ on YouTube as well.

I’m trying my hand at a lot of cold hardy flowers this year, and started back in the late summer / autumn last year sowing various flowers to put in the soil and in pots. The best of these have been the biennials including the wallflowers, which are now already starting to bloom, the honesty (lunaria), the sweet William, hollyhock, forget-me-nots and the Canterbury bells, and the perennial aquilegia. All have survived the winter and the sub-zero overnight temperatures in pots and in the ground, and many are now adding new growth.

The real benefit of overwintering these plants and a whole host of cold hardy annuals and perennials too is that it makes for much more robust plants that are less likely to be gobbled up by tender stem loving slugs, snails and earwigs – which tend to go into dormant mode themselves over winter. And while it looks like the plants have been stagnant over the winter, all the growth has been happening below soil level as the plants put their energy into developing strong roots so they can get a running start as soon as the days begin to lengthen.

Aside from those mentioned, I’ve started quite a few annuals and perennials over December through to February from seed. Hardy annuals already germinated indoors and moved outside include sweet pea, pansies, cornflowers, Iceland poppies, Bells of Ireland and godetia (clarkia). I’ve also started some half-hardy plants indoors like schizanthus and slow growing geraniums and petunias in the hope of earlier flowers.

Perennials which are now popping up include roses and oriental poppies, snap dragons, purple Echinacea, steel blue nitro echinops and bright yellow Billy balls.

Next week we’ll have a proper look at how things are coming along inside and outside and why growing dahlias from seed now rather than tubers later is a great idea if you like surprises.