American Plant Spring Flowers

We always had gardens - in the Midwest and more recently on our tiny patio garden on Capitol Hill. It’s been four years since we moved to northern Virginia and we now have an even smaller balcony garden. By that I mean three coco lined window baskets that are suspended from the backs of the chairs. We filled the baskets with pansies, violas, and ivy for the winter/Christmas season and they all miraculously survived the rather harsh winter. But the boxes were a bit sparse since the spikes didn’t last. So after our morning walk we went to American Plant yesterday to see what we could find. We were looking for something that could replace the spikes, but also add a bit more color to the yellow, white, and maroon pansies. It’s always fun to look around the vast array of options. I didn’t think we would have room for anything more than six plants so we needed to choose carefully. I asked one of the gardeners what might be a good spike replacement and she offered the silver dollar as an idea. We didn’t want anything that would grow too wide or too tall and that seemed to be good. I had also googled some ideas and Angelonia came up. We found them and it looked nice too. Salvia is another flower that grows tall and thin so we got one of those. Since the balcony gets full sun we added in a yellow bracteantha, red Gebera daisy, and a pink spotted dahlia. The place was quite busy on a late Monday morning flower shopping spree. We used to have to wait until after Memorial Day to plant anything in the Midwest. It’s so nice to start the planting season sooner.