Autumn & Winter bedding plants FAQs
Autumn is a fantastic time to spruce up tired displays for the colder months. Winter brings short days and chilly weather but that’s no reason to neglect your beds and borders. Pansies, violas, and bellis are just three fantastic blooms that provide colourful cheer, perfect for filling pots and hanging baskets to brighten your garden even on the darkest days of winter. Choose early spring flowering bulbs like galanthus and crocus to brighten the garden in late winter and herald the return of spring.
What are good bedding plants for winter?
Pansies are winter bedding plant classics. With a huge range of flower colours from deep midnight black and going through yellow, orange to two-tone raspberry frazzles there really is something for everyone. Violas are a close second to pansies with their delicate, subtle blooms and fantastic cold tolerance.
If you have a woodland style garden, the native blush pink cyclamen coum and buttery primula vulgaris thrive in shady spots and their striking blooms will draw out darker areas with the promise of spring.
How to get winter colour in a garden
It couldn’t be easier to add colour to your winter garden. Simply empty out your summer displays and use the containers to grow your favourite winter bedding. Plant a mix of heights in your winter containers, using hellebores to provide demure structure towards the back of the pot and low growing primula, pansies and violas for pops of colour at the front.
Cover bare soil through the winter by planting a colourful mix of winter bedding. Fill gaps left by dead summer annuals through beds and borders using striking cyclamen coum and bellis. Plant perennial hellebores for eye-catching flowers every winter and add patches of early spring flowering bulbs for early spring colour and scent.
What flowers in autumn & winter?
Lots of lovely plants, bulbs and shrubs flower during the autumn and winter. Winter bedding plants like pansy, viola and bellis provide the easiest and quickest injection of colour into the garden in the colder months. They thrive in pots, window boxes and hanging baskets and are easy to move around the garden to wherever needs a bit of bright cheer. Autumn flowering bulbs like colchium and Nerine dowdenii ‘Isabel’ flower in late autumn, providing bright pink blooms that bridge the colour gap left between the end of summer flowering perennials and the start of winter bedding.
There are some lovely perennial plants that flower during the winter months. Hellebores return every year with winter blooms in startling shades of black, pink and deep purple. Crocus and snowdrop bulbs flower very early in the year outdoors, whereas hyacinth bulbs and paperwhites are lovely even earlier if forced to flower at Christmas time indoors, brightening the home and filling it with magical sweet scent.
