Light up your garden this winter with colourful winter/spring bedding plants. These hardy plants are perfect for brightening up those cold and cloudy winter months with their vibrant rainbow of blooms.
Throughout this blog, we will share the benefits, planting guides and top varieties of our amazing Winter/Spring garden ready plants, so you can bring long lasting, bright blooms back into the garden this winter.
What are Garden Ready plants?
Our easy to grow Garden Ready plants are ready to be planted on arrival. They’re ideal for people who don’t have a greenhouse or want instant results in a short growing season. After planting they establish quickly, so you can sit back and enjoy their flowers.
Top Varieties
Pansies
Pansies are one of our most popular bedding plants, being an indispensable plant for a winter bedding scheme when most other plants are dormant. Colourful and compact, Pansy plants are certain to produce a delightful display in any garden border, pot or window box
Pansy Can can
A stunning, double-flowering Pansy. With dazzling, layered wavy blooms, Pansy Can Can is a radiant addition to the winter garden due to their bright, rainbow blooms. This fun and unusual variety will add a touch of joy to window boxes, containers and garden borders.
Pansy Cool Wave
These delightful pansies are strong growers and prolific bloomers. This new Pansy has exceptional overwintering performance and is the first to re-bloom in spring. Fill your hanging baskets, window boxes and pots with them for a sensational winter/spring display.
Pansy Winter/Spring Mixed
A reliable, high performing mixture of Pansies. Blooming in a bold variation of beautiful shades, these hardy plants carry on flowering from winter and last throughout spring. For those who like it bright in winter, this mixture of classic Pansy colours will bring nothing but cheerful colour to your winter garden.
Primula
Primula flowers provide you with bold and vibrant colours all through winter and spring. Blooming for weeks, these easy to grow flowers are a fantastic, versatile bedding plant.
Primula Colour Carnival
Create a wonderful display with this sensational mixture of bi-coloured Primula. Plant these flowers where you can enjoy their beautiful fragrance, such as window boxes or in containers by the front door for greeting guests. They are also perfect for attracting bees and butterflies to the garden.
Primula Primlet
Almost resembling a mass of miniature roses, Primula Primlet bloom with stunning double and semi-double flowers in a variation of pretty yellow, red and violet shades. These vibrant, hardy perennials may look delicate, but they will thrive all throughout the tough late winter weather.
Primula Wanda Mixed
This compact and semi evergreen perennial bears masses of vibrant flowers with contrasting yellow centres. Enjoy their fragrant flowers in patio containers or plant them as a bright showstopper in the front of the border. This versatile plant is also perfect for edging or under-planting shrubs and roses.
Violas
A modern favourite of the British gardener. Viola are spectacular performing trailing plants that flower in bright, vivid colours and really make an impact in any garden. Free flowering with a soft fragrance they are perfect for winter hanging baskets and containers where their trailing habit will thrive.
Viola Teardrop Mixed
Create a cascade of bright colour in the winter garden with the beautiful clustered flowers in our Viola Teardrop mixture. The scented blooms, each looking rather like a smiling face, will cascade over the edge of your pots and baskets from October to April, an absolute delight to behold.
Planting Guide
- Plant in well-drained soil.
- For Pansies, plant plain-faced types en masse in beds and borders, and bicolours and whiskered types along paths where you can appreciate the delicacy of their pretty patterns.
- Water and feed regularly during the growing season.
- Deadhead as required to ensure further growth spurts is facilitated.
- Plant straight away upon arrival into pots and use either freshly prepared soil (with organic matter) or a balanced potting compost.
- Water regularly and make sure soil does not become too dry. This will also help to produce a bigger plant with greater flowering potential.
- Placing your empty hanging basket on a bucket so it is held firmly in place whilst you add the plants.
- Fit basket with liner and trim off any excess material that protrudes above the rim.
- Use a balanced potting compost and fill your basket until it is level with the first layer of slits and gently firm the compost down.
- Insert your trailing plants by pushing the plants head-first from the inside through the slits.
- Continue to plant until all the slits have been filled, and then gently tease out the roots of the plants.
- Add more compost and work it around the roots of the plants until the basket is almost full.
- Fill in around the roots with further compost mix; aiming to keep the soil surface an inch below the rim of the basket to prevent compost spilling out when watering.
- To finish, water your hanging basket thoroughly.
