Peter Dowdall: White flowers add a cool, clean and calm look

Whether you're a gardening beginner or expert, Irish Examiner columnist Peter Dowdall has the answer to your questions

Using white such as this white antirrhinum brings a calming and restful tone to the garden. Picture: iStock

Bedding plants are frowned upon by many “serious” gardeners but not I, which must make me a frivolous gardener. You see I love colour and nothing can bring colour to the garden like summer bedding flowers.

I don’t use them in the traditional way, made popular during Victorian times, that is in dedicated and often perfectly symmetrical and formal planting schemes.

There’s not too much symmetrical in my world and thus I like to use them in a much more informal manner, dotting them here and there in between established plantings of shrubs and perennials.

You can use them in so many ways and this is one of the reasons that they are great in a garden. Mixed hues will bring a cacophony of colour to your outdoor space, whereas one colour tone can create often much-needed unity to a garden. 

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Imagine for a second the repetition of yellow and orange summer flowers throughout your garden, or blues or pinks or whatever your preferred tone is. Planting them like this can make a rather unorganised garden appear much more together by bringing some continuity to your planting.

In a new garden, beds can often look quite bare for the first few years if the correct spacing is left between plants. To over-plant and not leave enough space is a common mistake and one that will come back on you a few years after planting, as they all grow into each other and the area can become overcrowded and messy.

That bare look can be disguised, and overcrowding avoided, by clever use of summer bedding. Plant your seasonal colour in between your more permanent plants. They will mature and give great colour quickly but as they are mostly annuals, they will simply die off after one season.

Peter Dowdall: "When choosing summer bedding for your garden, do spend a bit of time checking to see which ones are beneficial to bees and other pollinating insects." Picture: John Allen

Pots filled with colour are really the staple of many summer gardens. Hanging baskets, window boxes, pots and containers will brim with colour and life by using bedding plants. What’s more, is that there is nothing in any rule book to say that pots need to be on the patio or next to the front or back door. In fact, they don’t need to be on a hard surface at all.

Early spring flowering shrubs, for example, which are now finished their annual display and may look otherwise a bit dull, can be brought to life by the clever positioning of pots filled with annuals around the garden and in amongst them.

I’m on a white buzz at the moment and, in fact, have been for a few years now. I am all about the use of whites and greens in my garden, I just love the calming, restful, crisp and clean look that the different shades of whites and greens bring to the area. 

Thus the bedding plants that I am using are white antirrhinum, white Dianthus barbatus, which is a white form of Sweet William and not technically a bedding plant, though I tend to treat it as such, and Bacopa Snowflake, lots of it.

This Bacopa Snowflake is important, not just because it flowers profusely in the purest of whites and that its versatility means that I can plant it as a ground cover, to drape down over walls or in hanging baskets, no, it’s important because it is loved by bees and not all bedding plants are.

Again, Bacopa is not technically a bedding plant as such and it is not an annual, rather more correctly classified as an Alpine plant or frost-tender perennial but, again, I treat it as an annual. 

In my garden, like all plants, it has to sink or swim, I can’t be doing with molly-coddling it. If it comes on next year I treat it as a bonus, if it succumbs to our winter wet and cold, then so be it, I feel it owes me nothing for the display that it gave during the summer and early autumn.

When choosing summer bedding for your garden, do spend a bit of time checking to see which ones are beneficial to bees and other pollinating insects. Try and avoid using intensively hybridized forms as these are often useless for pollinators. 

Instead, look for those with simple flowers where the pollen and nectar is easily available. Bacopa is good and so too Bidens, which are now available in a range of shades from bright yellow, through oranges to red tones.

Some Cosmos too, which will flower well into autumn, are good along with some Sunflowers. I say some because not all of them are and in many cases, it is trial and error to see which ones they will like.

Time to look at bedding plants again, not in terms of exclusive, seasonal displays but rather as an accompaniment to the rest of the garden and when it comes to the bees, a bit of time spent researching means that we can get the colour and do the right thing.

Plant your seasonal colour in between your more permanent plants.

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