CHAPTER V
BIENNIALS
Biennials are plants that do not flower till the second year after sowing. They are sown in spring and summer, pricked out when large enough, and transplanted, either in the autumn or the following spring, to their flowering places. If you can only have a small patch in a small garden, we advise you to buy, ready-grown, every spring, the few biennials you need. You can get all the well-known ones cheaply by the dozen, or just as they have been sown in a box. But if you are one of those lucky children who grow up in a big garden, we advise you to beg for a little extra bit for a ‘nursery,’ and then to try your hand at growing some of the easier biennials and perennials from seed. Some people will tell you that this operation is beyond the skill and patience of any child, but we think that if you will follow our instructions carefully you might succeed. Do not dream of trying all we tell you about in one season. In every chapter we speak of more plants than any one child could crowd into one small garden. You must choose some of your great favourites to begin with, and each year add a few new ones to the plants you have learnt to manage well.
Skilled gardeners grow some biennials, as annuals, by raising the seed in frames and greenhouses early in the year; but this, we think, would be too difficult for children to do without help. So you must, as we have said, buy your biennials ready-made, or you must get someone to raise them in heat for you, or you can sow your own seed one year, understanding that the seedlings will not flower till the next. Of these three plans we think the purchase of ready-made seedlings the easiest, but in some ways the least satisfactory. At any rate, if you must adopt it, try to get them from good nurserymen. Those you buy in the London streets or from advertisement columns are often grievously disappointing, so that when your biennials flower you discover you have thrown your money and your labour away. Your Snapdragons are either hideously splotchy or crudely magenta; your pink Canterbury Bells are blue and white; your Wallflowers are spindly and colourless. A few experiences of this kind will soon drive you to buy your own seed from one of the best firms, and for a few pence and some happy hours of gardening to get more plants of the best colour and quality than you can possibly use. Then you will have the pleasure the true gardener always finds in giving some of his plants away, or you can exchange your surplus stock for plants you do not possess yet.
Wallflowers (Cheiranthus).
This is a good biennial to start with, because every seed comes up and comes quickly. Sow thinly on a partly shaded patch of ground, and prick out when the seedlings have four good leaves. Do this on a showery day, if possible, and plant in rows ten inches apart each way. It is important to sow your seed early in the spring, because where the winter is severe the plants should be in their permanent quarters by May or June. If you transplant them late in the autumn, they suffer greatly from frost. In London market-gardens the seed is sown early in February; the plants are put out in May, and by Christmas are in flower. A seedling Wallflower has a tap-root as well as fibrous roots, and this is why the seedling should be pricked out once before it is transplanted to its permanent quarters. If you left it where it was sown it would send down a great root like a carrot, and then when you tried to move the plant you would kill it. Many gardeners pinch off the tap-root when they prick out, and then the Wallflower makes fibrous roots that can be safely transplanted. Mr. Robinson says that a well-grown Wallflower in a London market-garden could not be covered by a bushel basket, so now you know what size your plants ought to be, and how many you will have room for in your border. If you buy them ready-made late in the autumn, you will probably find that each plant has two bare, lanky stalks, with a miserable little bunch of leaves at the top; and when a frost comes they will look so dejected that you will pull them up and throw them away.
Pansies and Tufted Pansies (Viola Tricolor).
The Pansies, or Heart’s-ease, and Tufted Pansies (known to nurserymen as Violas) can be treated as annuals, biennials, or perennials, according to position, climate, and soil. In a Cornish garden from October to Christmas we had Pansies in flower from seed sown at the end of May, so they were annuals. But we had put them in their permanent places that autumn, because we wanted them to live through the winter and make the border gay the summer following, when they became biennials. At the end of the summer we kept the best of them to flower another year, and, if they liked, a year after that.