A year of Free flowers

Anne Swithinbank reveals her free seed favourites from last year, and offers expert advice on sowing this year’s seeds

- Anne Swithinbank

LAST year I was given the enviable project of writing the regular pages on how to grow free seeds given away with AG. Part of this consisted of supplying step-by-step pictures on how to sow and the by-product was an array of plants I might not otherwise have grown.

These filled the garden with colour last summer and we have more to come. Hardy annuals, cornflower and larkspur, are waiting as small plants in the ground, ready to flower this summer, and in the unheated greenhouse, a pot of nigella with its ferny foliage has the promise of early blooms. Growing biennial foxgloves and perennials like echinacea from seed has meant I can plant large drifts at almost no cost.