'Scatter flowers' will transform your cottage garden!
Seeds to sow NOW using a concept that I only half made up
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If you’ve been reading my last few newsletters (hello again by the way - thank you for being here!) you’ll know I’ve recently become (even more) consumed by the aspirational idea of totally filling every corner of my garden with plants.
I think it’s a reaction against the feeling of relative emptiness that descends on the garden every winter. I just can’t stand the sight of all the bare, unplanted earth. But the happy truth is, this bare earth that reappears in our gardens every winter actually presents a glorious opportunity: the opportunity to sow scatter flowers!
What are scatter flowers? Well, ok, to be entirely honest, it’s a category of flower I have half made up and half adapted based on the design advice of Piet Oudolf - a European garden designer and the grandfather of naturalistic planting styles. Piet talks about having ‘scatter plants’ - plants that you only semi-intentionally plant. These are tough, self-seeding plants that will pop up in any spaces you’ve left unoccupied, giving your garden a loose, natural feel - like a wild and rambling meadow.
So, today I’ve taken this idea and adapted it to flowers that can happily be scattered through a Perth garden for spring blooms. These flowers have a few common characteristics:
They self-seed easily
The seeds don’t need to be buried - they can be thrown direct on the surface of the soil
The plants will grow to fill the space provided, adding colour and life to all the gaps left in your garden after autumn
They produce gorgeous spring flowers
They’re great for pollinators
You can save the seeds and sow them year after year
See, if the bare earth and rainy skies have been getting you down, scatter flowers are the answer. They need the bare earth - it gives them space to germinate, and the frequent rains help keep the soil moist enough for the seeds to grow with no further effort required from you.
And that is why I love scatter flowers. You don’t even have to bury them. These flowers I’ve selected for you in the list below are ones that can be literally thrown onto the bare soil in a sunny patch of garden and forgotten, and they should reward you for your lazy carelessness with spring blooms.
I say ‘should’ because I can’t 100% guarantee this will work for you every time, because nothing in our gardens is ever a total certainty. The thing with scatter flowers is you have to accept that there will always be a little randomness in the equation. Last year, for example, I sowed a billion poppy seeds - they germinated beautifully but then another uninvited random plant outgrew and outcompeted them (my guess is that I should have sown them in a sunnier location, but I’ll never know for sure). That’s why, for me, scatter flowers will always be a lucky dip, an experiment, and one that works best when you have heaps of seeds you can throw around a little recklessly.
This year I’m scattering seeds for carrots, false queen annes lace, fennel, mustard greens and poppies. Cast a wide net, scatter plenty of seeds, and your garden will almost certainly surprise and delight you. Here are my favourite scatter flowers to throw around NOW for a Perth garden that explodes this spring.
Ageratum
Ageratum is a lovely little self-seeder that has purple or white fluffy flowers that look like teeny versions of the 1990s toy that a quick google informs me is called a Koosh ball. So fluffy and the bees love them!
Borage
Borage is a bit of a garden thug. A ready self-seeder it always appears in my garden of its own volition, with fuzzy, slightly spiky leaves and white or purple star shaped flowers that taste like cucumber (great in G&Ts). Borage is a hardy space filler and great for attracting beneficial bugs to your patch.
Breadseed poppies
AKA opium poppies! These glorious flowers are amazing dotted through the spring gardens, like pink teacups filled with giddy, pollen-drunk bees. The flower heads also look beautiful as they dry too, so leave them in your garden to turn brown, then save the seeds.
Californian poppies
Another gorgeous kind of poppy, Californian poppies cope well with drought. The most common variety has sunshine orange blooms, but you can get them in other colours too. They set seed in pods that spring open in the sunshine, scattering their seeds for next year.
Carrots
This year’s MVP (most valuable player), carrot seeds are my scatter flower experiment for Spring 2024. After repeatedly trying and failing to sow carrots in early autumn, I threw hundreds of seeds around carelessly in May and they all germinated! The garden is now full of an obscene number of baby carrots and my plan is to harvest some to eat and let the rest flower in the garden beds (carrot flowers are incredible).
Chicory
A tough little salad green, chicory has gorgeous, ruffly, cornflower blue flowers which the bees love!
Coriander
Coriander is the best scatter plant. Sow it all through your sunny garden beds, harvest the leaves to cook with through winter and in spring leave it alone to produce lacy, delicate white flowers that are great for all kinds of insects, the harvest the seeds once they have turned brown and dry.
Cosmos
Pastel blooms that dance above your other plants at springtime, I have repeatedly forgotten to sow cosmos seeds for the last three years running. Not this year. They are tough and beautiful and will attract an abundance of bees.
False Queen Anne’s lace
This one, if sown in autumn or early winter, can grow as tall as a grown man! With more lacy, white blooms it is a great one to scatter towards the back of your garden beds.
Fennel
Fennel is a total thug and I love it. You can be rough with fennel - you hardly even need to scatter it, it will pop up on its own. Let it self-seed wherever it likes, and if you and your fennel plants disagree on the optimal location for it to shoot out its feathery green foliage and yellow spring blooms you can just rip out the offending plants and cook them into something yummy (like this or this). Scatter in the middle of your garden beds.
Flanders poppies
I never sowed Flanders poppies, I never scattered them, I never bought seeds. They blew in on the wind and every spring they reappear, little bursts of red throughout the garden. They are such joyous brutes and will happily fill asa much space as you give them. They get a bit ragged by late spring, so just give them enough time to dry and set seed, then rip them out and shake the dry plants over your garden to let the seeds fall out. They’ll be back next year. Scatter towards the front and middle of your beds (they work well sown en masse along narrow beds too).
Parsley
Parsley plants have beautiful delicate flowers and no one knows because we always bloody rip them out as soon as they ‘bolt’. Not I! Nor - hopefully - you. Leave your parsley to flower and set seed and you’ll always have a tasty fresh herb floating around your garden somewhere. Scatter towards the middle of your garden bed.
Mustard greens
Scatter mustard greens in the middle and back of your bigger beds. Giant red Japanese mustard greens are my favourite - their purple/red leaves are so ornamental and, if left to flower, they will shoot out 6ft tall flower heads covered in yellow daisy-like flowers at spring, followed by delicate, feathery, rattle seed pods.
Pincushion flowers
With little pastel purple flowers, pincushion flowers do well in Perth, so well they can be a tad weedy (like fennel). I don’t mind, I appreciate their stoic, toughness. Scatter them towards the front of your beds.
Tansy
With highly fragrant (dare I say stinky??) leaves, tansy is the quintessential traditional cottage garden flower. I believe it used to be used medicinally, but its not considered edible these days. It produces lovely bobbly yellow flowers, the bees love it, and its strong scent is thought to help deter (or at least confuse) the bugs who try to eat your veggies. It can grow tall and will happily stick around a few years if you let it, so give it space to spread and scatter the seeds towards the back of your bed.
And there you have it. My favourite scatter flowers for a spring garden filled with fairly lazy and self sufficient blooms! If you found this guide useful, please do me a favour and hit the ❤️ button - it helps more people discover my newsletter!
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I loved this. I’m in Scotland, so very different climate but good lessons learned here. We moved into a house with a perfectly manicured garden, the previous owners were in their 80s and out all the time, so a weed never dared peek above the soil. We work full time (me sometimes in another country) and have a young kid, so the garden has had to adapt. Sometimes I give my son a strainer with green manure seeds or wildflower seeds and have him go shake above any bare earth he sees. We’ve got poppies everywhere, and lots of things popping up. We pulled up some of the pavers, and just randomly dug in all the old seeds sitting in the greenhouse and a surprising number have popped up.
Saving this one for sure!