Growing Guides

Calendula (Calendula officinalis), often called pot marigold, is one of the easiest and most cheerful flowers you can start from seed. Its golden and orange blooms flower for months, feed pollinators, and even give you edible petals for the kitchen....

Hollyhocks (Alcea rosea) are the towering, old-fashioned flower that gives a cottage garden its charm, sending up 5 to 8 foot spikes of open blooms that bees and hummingbirds adore. They are usually biennial, so a little planning gets you...

Johnny Jump-Ups (Viola tricolor) are the tiny, tricolor violas whose purple, yellow, and cream faces seem to smile up from the garden. Also called heartsease and wild pansy, they are hardier and more free-spirited than their big pansy cousins, blooming...

Nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus) are one of the few flowers that earn a place in both the flower bed and the salad bowl. The big seeds are easy to handle, they thrive in poor soil that would starve fussier plants, and...

Pansies (Viola x wittrockiana) are the cheerful, face-like flowers that carry a garden through the cool shoulder seasons, blooming in spring and fall when little else does and shrugging off light frost along the way. They come in every color...

Zinnias (Zinnia elegans) are about the most generous flower a beginner can grow. Drop the seeds straight into warm soil, and within two months you have a bed of bold, long-stemmed blooms in nearly every color, alive with butterflies and...

Columbine (Aquilegia) is the graceful, spurred wildflower that nods over part-shade borders and woodland edges in late spring, in colors from clear blue and pink to deep wine and yellow. It is a perennial that hummingbirds love, self-sows into easygoing...

Cape daisy, known botanically as Osteospermum and often sold as African daisy, is a sun-loving flower that covers itself in bright, daisy-shaped blooms with a striking dark center. It is a tender perennial that most gardeners in the United States...

Chicory is the cool-season green behind radicchio, Belgian endive, and roasted chicory-root coffee, all forms of the same versatile plant. This guide covers how to grow chicory from seed, from a fall-focused direct sowing to harvesting crisp leaves, firm heads,...