French bedding plants

I wanted to have a word about bedding plants. Disdain is usually the term I would use. Why would you plant something so garish and frivolous in a garden?  But actually I realised that I treat lavenders in the same way.

They are cheap and cheerful and fill a gap. Lavender grosso is such a dependable plant here.   But even the Hidcotes work quite well.

And their colour is much more acid blue and contrasting to the foliage.   I can barely see the grosso flowers in the lavender bank.

But they give instant height and width to a planting scheme that hasn’t quite settled down yet.

I’m guilty of planting (or should I say plonking) them in the calabert garden as a cheap filler.

I actually went to work here this afternoon. It was a bit warm to be doing this thing; but I have three cubic metres of gravel to move.   So I decided to move the stones to the closest possible space.

I just had to haul the buckets of gravel ten feet and then throw them (gracefully) onto the path below.

This is a little track that I often use as a short cut when I am heading up the garden; so I have decided to retain it for this use.   But it does look like a garish gravel beach right now.

The bedding plants will have to soften this look.   I have eragrostis grasses to put in here. Along the edge of the gravel.   But they need another week or so in their new pots. I only potted them up a size this afternoon.

And I’m dithering about whether to lob in my two other favourite bedding plants: the gaura and the verbena. I suspect they will be too tall for this low wall.   I should save them for the new bed I’m going to create in front of the house.  

But I need to put something in this expanse of dirt. More lavenders? Certainly more santolinas. But they are not quite ready either. Maybe I should stop fussing and just put them in.   And the gauras and the verbenas.   After all, I’m probably the only one who will be worried abut the effect.   And I can dig them up in the autum and move them if they really are wrong.

Oh, the fussing with flowers.

At least veg are dead simple. Here are tonight’s thinnings for salad. My little gem rows were getting too crowded.

Tomorrow I really must try and do some weeding in here. I can barely see the beans for the weeds.