Year after year I wonder what I’ll put in our front flower bed, and year after year, after tossing up between stocks and delphiniums, or California poppies, or a froth of nemesia or dianthus, I plant the same again — petunias.
They’re not always the same petunia. These days I go for the ‘spreading petunias’, preferably in purple, which I love, though other years the bed has been red, because fire engine red looks good against the dark stone walls behind.
We’ve never had a bed of white petunias, because I am married to a man who hates white flowers. Why waste time and garden when the flowers could be coloured, he says, refusing to admit that white is a colour at all, insisting that it is just an absence of colour.
This year they’re mauve petunias, the wonderful spreading variety that can grow to about a square metre per plant.
Petunias also look fabulous spilling out of hanging baskets or pots. They grow fast, give more flowers per square metre than possibly any other annual and are very, very hard to kill, unless the snails get them in their first few vulnerable weeks, in which case your petunias will vanish faster than the dog’s dinner.
Like most annuals, petunias grow readily from seed, and seeds are certainly the cheapest way to get an abundance of petunias. But although I am an eager seed planter, I mostly buy my petunias in punnets.
I reckon that no one needs a bed of flowers to tend in mid-summer that is bigger than four punnets of spreading petunias, minus a few square metres to the snails.
Petunias can begin to bloom a few days after you’ve planted the seedlings or even while they are still in punnets if the weather is hot and they are watered well.
Otherwise they sulk and sit there till the days warm up and they go zoom.
They’ll survive droughts, and the two weeks you are away on holiday and can’t water them, but they won’t grow much either.
Petunias do best when lovingly watered and fed every month or so, so they keep putting out more and more blooms.
Trim them back if they get a bit straggly, especially in hanging baskets, and give them another feed and water when you do.
But otherwise what they need is just sunlight (good strong Aussie summer sun) and there will be a thousand petunias in the front garden, a shaded pergola, friends to lunch with and something cool to drink. Summer doesn’t get much better.
