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how to be a gardener - The complete online guide BBC Homepage Lifestyle Gardening Part One Part Two Are you signed in? Go here for more information Understand plants Plant types Annuals and biennials Perennials and bedding plants Woody plants Evergreen and deciduous plants Bulbs Climbers Plant names Test your knowledge Go further Plant lists Interactives Glossary Credits Programme information Help with plugins Gardening newsletter Site map
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2 - Plant types Print page Annuals From the Latin annus , meaning 'year' - and that's how long these plants take to grow from seed, flower, have sex, make more seed and die. Annuals are great for creating instant effects. There are two types:
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California poppy Hardy annuals Hardy-annuals such as corncockle love-in-a-mist and nasturtium can withstand the cold, so you sow them outdoors in spring: March or April. There's less work involved in raising them than with half-hardy annuals.
Nicotiana Half-hardy annuals Half-hardy annuals such as cosmos, petunia and salvia die if exposed to the cold, so they can't go into the garden until after the last frost. Sow indoors in spring. They'll keep going until killed by the first autumn frost.
Foxglove Biennials Latin again - this time ' biennis ' means 'two years', so no prizes for guessing that biennials flower not in the year they are sown but the following one. But, because these days we all want instant gratification, biennials are not widely grown. A familiar biennial is foxglove, more unusual is Echium wildpretii . Some plants grown as biennials are, botanically speaking, short-lived perennials, for example, sweet william and wallflower. They tend to be dug up after flowering simply because they don't perform well the following year, or become untidy. Previous Next
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2. Understand plants Introduction Plant types Annuals and biennials Perennials and bedding plants Woody plants Evergreen and deciduous plants Bulbs Climbers Plant names Test your knowledge Go further
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Plant lists View plant list on: Hardy annuals Half-hardy annuals Biennials Hardy perennials Half-hardy perennials Find thousands more plants in the BBC Gardening database .
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Video Watch video clips on: Annuals Tender annuals Herbaceous perennials Planting perennials Spring flowering bulbs
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