The long warm days of spring are here and excitement for the flower season is building! I have my first bouquet of daffodils on the dinner table and wildflowers are starting to unfurl one by one in the woods around my house.  Flower season brings all kinds of beauty and joy to my days, not to mention hummingbirds, bees and butterflies. All welcome companions in the garden.

If you’re wondering what  flowers to plant right now, you are in the gardening sweet spot. We only have four more weeks till our last frost date here in Southern Oregon and it is just about time to plant… well…everything.  So I thought I would take some time and share five flowers from our collection here at Siskiyou Seeds that I love having in my garden year after year.

These five flowers are standouts in the garden for color, productivity and for their versatile uses. Whether you’re planting a cutting garden or a vibrant array for pollinators.

1. Cosmos, Bright Lights - Cosmos are out of this world beautiful in the garden. Ethereal, angular and brilliant, they last a long time in a vase and have easy to collect seeds, so you can grow your favorite ones year after year. Very easy to grow cosmos can be sown directly in your garden or you can start them in potting soil . We have a few different colors of Cosmos, but I love the electric contrast of the orange cosmos with their bright green stems.

2. Marigold, Pesche’s Gold - We have a lot of varieties of Marigolds but Pesche’s Gold is perfect for flower arrangements or for drying and stringing into garlands. This variety has frilly double petaled gold and orange blossoms and it blooms for a long time bringing bursts of color into the fall. Marigolds are pretty hardy and in the right conditions this plant can get above 5 feet tall.

3. Scabiosa, Fata Morgana - I love growing perennial plants and Scabiosa is a great flower to grow if you don’t want to keep planting annuals. Fata Morgana has long thin strong stems and is an elegant creamy yellow color a bit like buttermilk. It lends a soft touch to your flower bouquets. The seed heads are pretty funky and add nice texture to everlasting arrangements as well. Scabiosa is a short lived perennial, in the late fall I cut back the stems and mulch the base of the plant with them.

4. Strawflower, Showy Mix - There is a bit of a theme here, apparently I love everlasting flowers. Strawflowers are probably one of the coolest everlasting flowers and the easiest to dry properly. This mix has a range of colors from copper to burgundy. Strawflowers have a long vase life if cut fresh and retain their color and texture really well in the drying process. Just make sure you pick them before too much of the yellow is exposed. If you pick strawflowers too late they will set seed after they are picked.

5. Zinnia, Queen Lime Orange - I know I am not the only garden writer who is enamored with the Queen Lime Series of Zinnias. This variety is popular for a reason! It takes all the things we love about Zinnias, the strong stems, the prolific quantity of blossoms, the long vase life and then switches up the bright intense color palette of Zinnias into something more subtle. The lime fading into the apricot really does something for me and updates bouquets by allowing me to follow a more mono-chromatic style.

≈ by Taryn Hunter