#414: Forgotten Family of Spring
What happened to the flowers that once filled our spring gardens? Lisa shares the story of cool-season hardy annuals, why so many of these beautiful flowers were forgotten, and how learning when to plant them can bring an entirely new season of blooms back to your garden.
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The Field and Garden Podcast is produced by Lisa Mason Ziegler, award-winning author of The Cut Flower Handbook, Vegetables Love Flowers, and Cool Flowers, owner of The Gardener’s Workshop, Flower Farming School Online, and the publisher of Farmer-Florist School Online and Florist School Online. Watch Lisa’s Story and connect with Lisa on social media!
The Forgotten Flowers of Spring: Rediscovering Cool-Season Hardy Annuals
When you picture a spring garden, what comes to mind?
For many of us, it is flowering trees, shrubs, bulbs, and perennials. We think of daffodils, tulips, flowering cherries, and all the familiar signs that winter is finally coming to an end.
But there is another whole family of spring flowers that used to have a much bigger place in our gardens.
They are cool-season hardy annuals, the group of flowers I affectionately call Cool Flowers.
These flowers thrive in conditions that would make many warm-season annuals miserable. They tolerate cold weather, and many actually perform better when they have the opportunity to grow during the cool months of the year. Depending on where you live, they may be planted in fall or very early spring.
Once you understand their timing, Cool Flowers can completely change what spring looks like in your garden.
What are Cool Flowers?
Cool Flowers are cool-season hardy annuals that can tolerate colder growing conditions than the warm-season annuals most gardeners are familiar with.
When gardeners think about annual flowers, we often automatically think about plants such as Zinnias and other summer bloomers. We wait for the danger of frost to pass, plant when the soil and weather warm up, and enjoy the flowers through summer.
Cool-season annuals work differently.
Cold weather is not simply something they tolerate. Cool conditions are part of what helps many of them thrive.
The important question is not whether Cool Flowers can grow in your area. It is when you should plant them based on your location and winter temperatures.
Some gardeners can plant hardy annuals in the fall and overwinter them. Others will plant them very early in spring. The timing changes from one climate to another, but the family of flowers itself is remarkably useful across many growing regions.
Which flowers are considered Cool Flowers?
This group includes many classic cut flowers and garden favorites.
Snapdragons, Bells of Ireland, Sweet William, Larkspur, Love-in-a-Mist, Poppies, Bupleurum, Bachelor Buttons, and other hardy annuals can all be part of a cool-season garden.
Many of these flowers once had a much more prominent place in home gardens.
That is one reason I think of them as the forgotten flowers of spring.
Why did cool-season annuals disappear from so many gardens?
Gardening habits have changed tremendously over the generations.
When I look back at the gardens I remember from earlier generations, including the gardens of our grandmothers, flowers were simply part of everyday life. They were grown alongside vegetables, around homes, and throughout the landscape.
Over time, lifestyles changed. Families had less time to tend traditional gardens, and the plants readily available to gardeners changed too.
Warm-season annuals became what many of us learned to expect when we went shopping for annual flowers. We became accustomed to buying and planting annuals once warm weather arrived.
Eventually, that became our definition of what an annual flower was supposed to be.
That warm-season mindset is one of the reasons Cool Flowers can initially feel so strange.
Planting an annual flower in fall or when the weather is still cold in early spring can seem completely backward when everything you have learned tells you annuals belong in warm weather.
But these are not warm-season annuals.
Once you stop trying to grow them as though they are, everything begins to make more sense.
Can annual flowers really be planted in fall?
Yes, depending on your climate and the particular flower.
When I first learned that some hardy annuals could be fall planted, the idea was not widely discussed. I even remember asking about fall planting during a horticulture class and being told that the idea was essentially preposterous.
Thankfully, I did not let that stop me from investigating it.
The deeper I went into this family of flowers, the more determined I became to understand how they grew.
That curiosity eventually became a major part of my own gardening and flower farming, and later, something I began teaching other growers.
The key is recognizing that there is not one universal planting date for Cool Flowers.
Your planting window depends on your climate, particularly your winter conditions and lowest temperatures.
That is why two gardeners growing the same flower may need to plant it at very different times.
Why grow Cool Flowers?
One of the greatest benefits is what they add to the garden during a time of year when we are desperate for flowers.
After a long winter, those first blooms feel extraordinary.
Cool Flowers can fill the space between the earliest signs of spring and the arrival of our summer flower gardens. They can grow alongside spring bulbs, shrubs, and perennials, or create a beautiful cutting garden all on their own.
Here in Virginia, Cool Flowers can give us flowers to harvest around Easter and Mother's Day, long before the warm-season garden reaches its stride.
That makes them especially valuable to cut-flower growers, but you certainly do not have to be a flower farmer to appreciate them.
A home gardener can enjoy exactly the same benefit: more flowers, earlier in the season.
Are Cool Flowers good for pollinators?
Early spring flowers are valuable for more than their beauty.
As temperatures begin to warm, bees and other beneficial insects become active again. They are looking for the same thing we are looking for after winter: signs of life.
Having flowers blooming during that early part of the season provides additional floral resources in the garden.
Our grandmothers may not have used phrases such as “beneficial insect habitat” every time they planted flowers beside the vegetable garden, but those flowers were doing important work.
Adding cool-season annuals can help bring that diversity back into our gardens.
Why does growing Cool Flowers seem confusing?
Most of the confusion comes down to timing.
We are so accustomed to thinking like warm-season gardeners that planting flowers before our usual spring planting date can feel wrong.
Cool Flowers ask us to think differently.
Instead of waiting until all danger of frost has passed, the goal is to determine the planting window that lets these hardy annuals take advantage of cool weather.
Once you figure out when to plant Cool Flowers in your location, the entire concept becomes much easier.
That is also why I am such a believer in planning your cool-season garden ahead of time. Knowing your climate, your planting window, and which crops you want to grow removes much of the uncertainty.
Can Cool Flowers and warm-season flowers grow in the same garden?
Absolutely.
In fact, one of the best reasons to understand both groups is that they can work together to give you a much longer season of flowers.
Cool-season flowers begin the show.
Then, as spring moves toward summer, warm-season annuals take over.
Instead of thinking of flower gardening as one summer season, you can begin creating a succession of blooms that starts much earlier in spring and continues right through fall.
That is when the garden really begins to change.
Bringing the forgotten flowers back
Cool-season hardy annuals were once familiar members of our gardens, and they can be again.
We simply have to relearn something gardeners before us already understood: not every annual flower is waiting for summer.
Some of the most beautiful flowers in the garden are happiest when the nights are still chilly and spring is just beginning.
Once you learn which Cool Flowers you want to grow and determine the right planting time for your location, you may discover an entirely new season of gardening that was hiding in plain sight.
And after a long winter, there is nothing quite like walking outside and finding a garden full of flowers waiting for you.
