Annual Flowers - Adding Non-Stop Color to the Garden

Tips, tricks and step-by-step how-tos to make the most of annual flower plants in your garden. Whether creating seasonal containers or adding season long color to your border, annual flowers can be used to design everything from a cottage garden to a tropical paradise.

Cool Season Annuals - Flowers for Spring and Fall
Cool weather can be hard to garden in, because you never know how long it will last. But there are many annual flowers that prefer the cool days of spring and fall. Many cool season annuals look wonderful in containers and growing these flowers will make your gardening season seem that much longer. If you live in a warm climate, some of these flowers will bloom from fall through spring.

Glossery Term: What is an Annual Flower or Plant?
Garden plants are usually categorized as annuals, biennials and perennials. But then there are gray areas like hardy annuals and tender perennials. What does 'annual' actually mean?

Selecting Healthy Plants
Get your garden off to a good start by choosing problem free plants.

Grow Award Winning Plants
Growing new varieties of plants is the best way to learn what grows well for you. "Plant of the Year" awards point gardeners toward excellent choices for their own gardens.

Marigolds - A Classic Bedding Plant
Marigolds are a favorite formal bedding plant of garden designers. Marigolds are cheerful, compact yellow, orange and burgundy annuals with flower shapes that can resemble daisies, coreopsis and carnations.

Sweet Peas - Adding Fragrance to the Garden with Sweet Peas
Sweet peas evoke old fashioned cottage gardens, with their fluttering blossoms and intense fragrance. Growing sweet pea vines in the garden is both simple and rewarding, with a long season of bloom and an abundance of cutting flowers.

Zinnias - A Burst of Hot Flower Colors from Zinnias
Bright colored zinnias can light up a border or container all summer long.