The best bedding plants for summer & autumn/winter
Bedding plants are the disposable, fast fashion garment of the gardening world. Unlike perennials that return year after year, bedding plants are produced en masse as this season's fancy and are not designed to have a long life in the garden. They come in all colours from the intense negligee pinks and purples of tumbling petunias, to the cooler frothy whites and blues of alyssum and lobelias, and the hot yellows and oranges of gazanias and begonias, and some, like primulas and pansies, come in all of these colours.
Traditional bedding plants can be supremely joyful for the instant – and often intense – colour they bring to the garden. Designed to flower their socks off through the season they are bred for, they are mostly easy to grow and, used wisely, you can make them work for whatever your style of garden.
The downside is that, being mostly tender or half-hardy plants, they won’t survive a winter without being moved to a greenhouse. Therefore, once they are past their best, many bedding plants are simply destined for the compost heap.
It was the Victorians that popularised the use of bedding plants, using them for grand, intricate displays in public parks and stately homes. They used hundreds of plants very close together to create pictures and intricate designs, a style called carpet bedding. There would have been a large cohort of gardeners on hand to raise the plants from seed and cuttings, plant them out, tend and water them through the summer and then take them all out and replant a whole new scheme for the next season.
It was all very time-consuming and labour intensive and, of course, hugely expensive, so over the last few decades these displays have fallen from favour. Ultimately, carpet bedding is a rather wasteful, unsustainable and high maintenance way to garden both in public and private spaces. Few of us have the time and space to plant out hundreds of seasonal plants, and garishly-coloured hanging baskets are frowned upon for not being stylish. It’s also hard to equate a mix of jolly, primary-coloured primulas with gardening trends such as rewilding and naturalistic planting.
When should I use bedding plants?
On a practical level, and an added bonus if you are a small space gardener in need of hard-working plants, many annual bedding plants, such as marigolds, pansies and busy lizzies also fall into the edible plants category. Pick them regularly and scatter their colourful petals through summer salads.
But bedding plants don't have to be all about the colour either as there are some great foliage varieties which are really important for bringing contrasts in texture and colour. Try trailing variegated nepeta, coleus or cineraria for some elegant leafy companions. For a more subtle look, fleshy, drought tolerant sedums, such as tender echeverias – often used for carpet bedding – come in a range of grey-green shades, and these are excellent for a low-maintenance summer container display.
How can I grow bedding plants?
You can grow bedding plants as annuals from seed, if you have the time and space – remember that planting in quantity is what gives a big impact. But it's easy to buy bedding plants in multi-sown trays at the garden centre, or via mail order as plug plants that can either be grown on or planted out when the weather is warm enough. Or for a totally trouble-free colour hit, buy a ready-planted container combination.
What are the best bedding plants?
While bedding plants might have a slightly unfashionable reputation, they don't have to be throwaway and totally temporary. To garden sustainably, you can protect tender varieties such as begonias, fuchsias and pelargoniums by bringing them indoors and cutting right back over winter to encourage another season's growth. Or you could use them to experiment with taking cuttings and grow your own for next summer. You can also use any summer flowering annual plant to bring new season colour to your garden, and some varieties of nicotianas and cosmos that fall into the bedding plant category will combine well with more natural style, grassy plantings too.
Top 6 Summer Bedding Plants
These fluted, velvety blooms come in a fantastic range of warm colours and look good on their own as well as with other summer bedding plants and perennials. Try a mix of the Can Can range – ‘Orange’, ‘Black Cherry’ and ‘Double Apricot’ – for a pot that will be brimful of spice-coloured flowers all summer long. Just keep dead-heading the spent flowers as they fade to encourage more blooms. Calibrachoas are easy to look after but need a very warm, sunny spot. Simply water weekly, adding a liquid seaweed feed every couple of weeks to boost their flower power, and you will be royally rewarded.
With tiny flowers the colours of boiled sweets, trailing summer verbenas are great for adding intense colour accents to any container. For maximum performance, verbenas need to be baked by full sun all day long. In damp and shady conditions, they will disappoint as this will encourage the proliferation of powdery mildew. They do need feeding every couple of weeks, but in the right spot will keep producing flowers well into autumn. Try ‘Vectura Purple’ for a rich shade.
This looks great on its own or tumbling over the edges of window boxes and containers. The intense blue and purple shades combine well with hot coloured marigolds, floriferous erigeron daisies or use them to provide a light underfroth under geraniums and pelargoniums. Look out for ‘Ultra Cascade mixed’ which includes shades from white through to deep blue and will keep the flowers coming right through the summer, with no need to deadhead.
A classic tender bedding plant, this can be a bit of a marmite choice, beloved by many, but equally a turn off for others. Some have fantastic foliage that is velvety and textured and can't help but bring a splash of the lush and the exotic. For a more subtle and elegant begonia display, try ‘Sweet Spice Bounty Coral’ or ’Illumination White Sparkle' with almost rose-like frilled blooms and subtle veined foliage. Or you might be seduced by the species types with fabulous textured foliage such as Begonia masoniana or B. conchifolia rubrimaculata that look wonderful planted up in individual pots and grouped together.
For hot coloured combinations, these star-shaped flowers make a great summer display. Traditional varieties might get a little straggly over the summer, but new cultivars have been bred to behave a little better and will remain compact, for example the two-tone Bidens' Red Yellow Centre' that will keep flowering through into the autumn. Bidens ferulifolia ‘Golden Eye’ also makes a good cushion of foliage with starry yellow flowers. They look great growing with chocolate cosmos.
A perennial and really good at outliving its billing as a summer bedding plant, anagallis (also commonly called pimpernel) will survive into a second and sometimes a third summer. With intense lapis lazuli blue flowers that are very eye-catching, Anagallis monellii 'Skylover' in particular stands out above many other blue flowers – it has a compact, slightly trailing habit, and is good for filling up a single pot, or works well combined with the daisy flowers of Erigeron karvinskianus.
Top 3 Autumn/Winter Bedding Plants
Pansies are a great autumn/winter stalwart. With impossibly cheery flowers, you can go garish and multicoloured or choose the more demure varieties in richer single colours. Try a large container of a single colour, for example Pansy Cool Wave Raspberry, which has a trailing habit and clumps together quickly to create a long-lasting compact display. Or go for the full pansy razzamatazz with a mixed bag of Frizzle Sizzle that combines bold yellows with shades of purple, and petals as frilly as a cancan petticoat, with a really long-lasting flowering season, sometimes over two years.
Cousins to the humble native cowslip, bedding primulas are a far cry from demure primroses, auriculas and candelabra types. They come in many different colours and shades and will certainly give you a carnival of flowers through the late winter and early spring months. The low, mounded plants look good en masse, but they are rarely subtle. For a single colour scheme, try colours ranging from hot coloured pinks such as 'Raesberrry Rose' or the more traditional warm spring yellows of 'Everlast'. Or go all out loud and proud with a collection like 'Springtide Mix'.
Quite possibly the perfect winter bedding plant, Cyclamen hederifolium is a great performer, with non-stop flowers in colours from white through to brilliant pinks and deep red. The ivy-shaped variegated leaves are also beautiful. These plants need minimal deadheading and will not only survive winter cold, but will reward you with their sustainability, self-seeding in the right conditions. They don’t need any trimmings or companion plants as they look great planted as a single colour or mixed in window boxes and larger containers, or individually in smaller pots and grouped together. Try 'Metis' for mixed shades or 'Album' for pure white flowers.
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