We hear a lot about bedding plants, particularly from English gardeners and tourists back from looking at English gardens, but what are bedding plants, anyway?
Certainly not, as you might think from the results some people seem to get, plants grown in the spot where the family dog insists on sleeping. Nor is bedstraw, a lovely thing though it is, quite suitable for use as a bedding plant.
Bedding plants—to get down to cases—are mostly annuals grown in big clumps and masses for bold, colorful effects. Usually, they are started indoors in pots or flats and set out when the weather permits.
Although some, like zinnias or annual poppies, do best when seeded where they are to grow. Gladiolus, tuberous begonias, and dwarf dahlias also rate as bedding plants, although they are bulbs that have to be dug up and replanted each year.
The key word in our definition is “masses.” So whatever you’re using as a bedding plant, use a lot of it—the result you’re after is not a scattering of individual “specimens” but a solid mass that looks like just one huge, spreading plant.
Whether the bed’s final height is just barely above the lawn grass around it or tall enough to screen a neighbor’s tennis court, the plants have to be set thick enough so that no bare ground is visible between them.
Annuals
Most of the annuals we usually grow for cutting will make good bedding plants if we forget about planting them in rows in the “cutting garden” and use them in swatches.
Bands and clusters in a display garden instead—there will still be plenty of flowers for cutting, so we can have our cake outside and eat it indoors, too.
Of course, the types of annuals we cut tend to be medium to tall growing, meaning they should be bedded out where they will show to best advantage from a distance rather than close-up.
Against a fence or shrub planting (which often gets discouraged-looking by midsummer), zinnias, cosmos, marigolds, and the dozens of other long-stemmed summer blooming flowers will draw our eyes out away. At the same time, the lower-growing plants lie at our feet close by.
Carpet Bedding
“Carpet bedding” is a term we encounter in Victorian garden books, and since “Victorian” is no longer a dirty word—even Victorian architecture is beginning to be looked at with favor—we can certainly find a multitude of uses for the gaily variegated effect of what IS a living carpet.
Of course, we all use groundcovers nowadays. Still, groundcovers, as we usually think of them, are perennial, practical covers for ground that would otherwise be an eyesore.
At the same time, carpet bedding is intended to be a warm-weather feature—something to please the eye of the owner and make the visitor exclaim with pleasure.
Why not, for instance, lift a few of the paving flags out of your terrace—off to one corner like the stamp on a letter—and make a bed, say, about 4×4 feet square?
Fill it with good soil, of course, and, if the spot is sunny, plant the bed with a solid mass of portulaca—even with the mixture of colors in which portulaca seed is so often sold, the effect comes dampness or drought, is as bright and gay as though a master Persian rug maker had been at work.
If it’s the shade you have to contend with, make the plants tuberous begonias or impatiens (pronounced impatience and impatient to bloom).
And don’t forget that fall, after the bedding plants have done their summer stint, is the time to set out a batch of early, low-growing tulips (the species, such as Kaufmanniana, are wonderful) they can stay right where they are for as many years as they want to go on blooming, with annual bedders planted right on top as the tulips fade.
Foliage Plants
Another and very important group of summer bedders are made up of foliage plants: coleus, dusty miller (Centaurea or artemisia), ivy geraniums, and the like, to say nothing of the wax begonias, which are so marvelously obliging that they produce colored leaves and a profusion of flowers,
All at the same time. Among the tall-growing foliage plants, amaranthus is bright with shades of red and shocking pink, and castor-oil bean is decorative with huge, wonderfully cut leaves in shades of green and bronze.
Bedding plants are the paints for making a bright summer picture: daub them on boldly or with elegant, tiny strokes, but never, never let the “canvas” show through.
44659 by James Fanning