ANNUALS & BIENNIALS

An annual plant is a plant that completes its life cycle within one year.

Many popular fruit and vegetable crops in a kitchen garden are annual plants, as are a range of common bedding plants or flowers.

Annual plants are typically grown from seed, though they can also be purchased from garden centres and nurseries as plugs or pot-grown plants ready to place in your garden.

A biennial plant is defined as a plant that completes its lifecycle over two years – growing in the first year before flowering and setting seed in the second.

Unlike perennials – annuals and biennials will not remain in place in your garden over multiple years, however, in the right conditions, certain annuals and biennial plants will self-seed readily.

This means that the seeds will naturally mature and disperse around the growing area in which they are planted and if you leave them to self-seed, this does of course mean that you can continue to enjoy them in your garden year after year.

The benefit of including annuals and biennials in your garden is that you can ring the changes. If you do not choose readily self-seeding varieties then you can opt to grow different flowering plants or other annual plants every year.