Sue Bradley explains how to save time, effort and money by growing flowers and vegetables that readily self-seed.
Come spring or summer, these obliging plants are just the job for creating drifts of colour and covering the ground with interesting foliage and blooms, with the added benefit of preventing weeds from getting a look in.
Whether they start as potted plants, or grow from seeds, their dogged determination to succeed means you’re unlikely to have to spend more cash to increase stocks. And if they get too much, simply carefully remove surplus seedlings as they emerge, sharing them with family and friends to pass on the easy rewards.
While many plants have evolved to self-seed, not all will successfully do this in the UK due to our climate. British wildflowers are a given, of course, and there are many annual seeds that wait in the soil until the conditions are right, or start growing in the autumn and then overwinter until the days lengthen and grow warmer. Do remember to let selfseeders mature fully and then scatter themselves around as nature intended, though you can limit their spread if you wish by removing flowering heads before they’ve fully seed matured.
Not all seedlings will grow into exactly the same plant as its parent (true-totype), as many self-seeders are attractive to insects and some degree of crosspollination (outbreeding) will take place, sometimes with striking results in terms of colour and petal style.
British native wildflowers are often prolific self-seeders
Take a look at places where they grow naturally to see the conditions they’re particularly suited to, while plants grown as green manures, such as scorpion weed from the USA and central Americas, will also keep coming back if allowed to mature.
Self-seeding plants are often a great choice for particularly dry areas and gravel gardens, finding small pockets of soil in which to put down their roots and flourish. If relying on Mother Nature to help populate beds and borders, take time to become familiar with the leaf shape of seedlings to avoid pulling up plants you’re looking to encourage.
Spring stunners
Look forward to a blue haze every spring after sowing Myosotis sp. In many cases cross pollination will bring a few pink and even white blooms. Look for M. sylvataica ‘Mon Amie Pink’ and M. alpestris ‘White’. These tiny flowers look great around tulips. Forget-me-not is a biennial and thrives in moist, well-drained soils.
Sow: March to May outdoors or indoors in September
Flowering time: April to June
Position: Sunny or shady spots
Height: Up to 30cm (1ft)
Brighten winter and early spring with the nodding flowers of hellebore. Grow more than one cultivar and there could be interesting self-seeded combinations in years to come. Saving and sowing he
