How to plant annuals in the edges of your flower beds

Planting annuals along the edges of your gardens can help unify your landscape. Each summer, install a handful of annuals in your yard in the same way you might use colourful ribbon to decorate a wrapped gift. Edge beds with ribbons of flowering annuals or run them in small drifts through existing perennial flower beds. But be sure to save a few annuals for planting in containers. The design idea here is to repeat the use of the same annuals in different parts of your yard, echoing threads and splashes of colour throughout the landscape, making the garden look and feel like a cohesive unit. Here are some more tips for adding annuals to your flower gardens.

When choosing annuals, look for those that have a long flowering time for your climate.

• Flowering cabbage, lobelias, pansies, and sweet alyssum are good candidates where temperatures remain cool in fall and early spring, or where summer night temperatures remain low.
• Moderate summer climates are ideal places to grow garden standbys like petunias and impatiens.
• Where summers are very hot, choose heat-tolerant annuals like ageratum, caladiums, annual grasses, narrowleaf zinnia, or any wax begonia.

The colour range in annuals is so great that you can have fun experimenting with different colour combinations and plant shapes from year to year while maintaining the same perennials and shrubs. Annuals are so inexpensive that you can even experiment with those that are marginally suited to your area. Sometimes you can find a spot for a container of annuals that is sheltered from the sun, or from brisk, chilly winds, expanding the number of plants that you can grow.

• In areas where asters and chrysanthemums won't bloom until September or October, pinch back the stems in July to half their length to make the plants compact. They will bear twice as many flowers in fall, and won't need staking to hold their heads high.

Want to change the accent colours in high-visibility beds? It's a cinch when you install a bush of red roses as the dominant plant.

• Annuals with blue, yellow, or white flowers will always compliment red roses. Just be sure to avoid crowding the rose, which needs abundant fresh air and sunshine to deter disease.