Early spring bedding: Off the peg diversity, John Sutton reports on pants that offer a contrast to the dominance of pansies and violas

摘要

What would most impress a horticulturally inclined visitor from Mars about bedding and patio plant sales in March and early April? It would surely have to be the dominance of pansies and violas, and the almost endless variations in colour and flower size in these charming small plants. Small wonder, our extraterrestrial visitor might think, that they sell in their tens of millions. It is certainly true that they neither have rivals in early spring now, nor yet are likely to have in any foreseeable future. But what nonetheless there is room for are similarly early-flowering, colourful and frost-hardy plants that provide off the peg diversity, and that contrast in habit and flower type with pansies and violas.