My nicotianas are just starting to bloom (don’t panic, my garden isn’t on steroids, this photo was taken last summer). Nicotianas (flowering tobacco) are carefree plants that are very easy to sprout indoors from seed. You can also find them at garden centers in the spring, but I like to sprout my own so I have more varieties to choose from.
Nicotianas come in all different colors and sizes. The flowers in the above photo are ‘Perfume Mix.’ This mix of pink, red, lime, white and lavender flowers grows 20 inches tall. There is also a separate Perfume cultivar called ‘Perfume Purple’ that also grows 20 inches and has rich purple blooms:
One of the shortest nicotiana cultivars that I use is ‘Avalon Bright Pink’ (a 2001 AAS Winner). It grows 7-10 inches tall:
The other two varieties I use a lot are the Saratogas (10 inches) and the Dominos (12 inches). I especially love the attention-getting ‘Domino Red’:
I use a lot of nicotianas in my flowerbeds because they are just as happy in partial shade (which I have a lot of) as they are in the sun. They’ll bloom like crazy for weeks. When they’ve bloomed themselves out, you can cut them back and they will rebloom in a couple of weeks. If you don’t like having a non-blooming annual staring at you from the garden, you can always cut back a few of the blooming flower spikes at a time so the plants start sending up new shoots while other ones are still blooming.
The only pest I’ve ever found on my nicotianas are aphids, and I’ve never had any disease problems with the plants. I don’t have to worry about fungus or wilt or any of the other diseases that sometimes plague annuals. I can always count on nicotianas for weeks and weeks of carefree blooms.