By Linda Wiggen Kraft,
Healthy Planet Green & Growing Editor
Fall gardens are the best in my opinion. There is a full exuberance of flower colors and shapes along with riotous red, orange and yellow leaf colors. Fall’s bright blue asters along with yellow goldenrod invite pollinators to the feast. Roses greet the cooler days with brighter colors and more blooms. Annuals are still blooming and they too become brighter with deeper colors. Only in fall are many flowers ready to share their gift of seeds. These seeds will be food for wildlife over the winter. Some seeds can be collected by human hands to carry this year’s garden into next year’s.
For some plants, the giving of seeds takes place without human intervention. Seeds are dropped nearby, or scattered by wind and wildlife into other parts of the garden. These seeds take root, grow and bloom next year. This planting of volunteers, as they are called, is the easiest way to carry the garden from one year to the next. In my garden, favorite self-sowing plants are Brown-Eyed Susans (rudbeckia triloba) with its smaller yellow flowers, Purple Coneflower (echinacea purpurea) with flowers and goldfinch devouring seeds, Love-In-A-Puff vine (cardiospermum) with heart imprinted seeds, Jewels of Opar (talinum paniculatum) with edible chartreuse leaves and tiny pink flowers on long stems, Flowering Tobacco (nicotiana sylvestris) 5 feet tall with fragrant white tubular flowers, Bronze Fennel (foeniculum vulgare) 5 feet tall host plant for swallowtail butterflies and Celosia (celosia argentea) with feathery fuzzy wheat shaped flowers.
Keeping flowers blooming usually means cutting old flowers off the plant. This keeps those flowers from going to seed. Now is the time to stop cutting the flowers, dead heading, so seeds can form. Collecting seeds by hand is often easy with the seeds on the flower stem ready to fall off. Other plants need more attention and steps to collect seeds. Celosia seeds are shiny black seeds about the size of a pin head. They fall off easily. A cut stem put in a bag and then shaken will drop sometimes hundreds of seeds. Flowering Tobacco also has tiny black seeds. Capsules full of seeds can be cut off the flower heads and collected in a bag. Love-in-a-Puff has little puffed balls along the vine. Each puff holds three lovely small pea shaped black seeds with a large white heart imprinted on the black seed. The puffs turn brown when the seeds are mature. Peel the puff open to find three seeds inside. Most plants have flowers that will turn brown or black going from colors we love to seeds. Bronze Fennel has small yellow flowers arranged in an umbrella shape on top of the tall stalks. The flowers turn brown and become seeds. Goldfinches seem to appear out of nowhere when Purple Coneflower heads have turned from pink petals and orange/brown heads to dark brown. One seed head has many seeds. Jewels of Opar seeds itself along the front of my garden. The small pink flowers turn dark with seeds and can be picked by hand. Brown-eyed Susans have dark seed centers when the yellow petals turn dark and the seeds ripen.
These are only a few examples of garden seeds that can bring favorite plants into next year and years beyond. Collect only seeds enough for your garden and perhaps gifts for others. Always leave most of the dried stalks and seeds in the garden as food and shelter for birds, insects and other garden life.
Linda Wiggen Kraft is a landscape designer of holistic/organic gardens. She is an artist and creativity workshop leader. She is teaching an all-day “Fantasy & Real Flower Art” workshop Oct 18th. Her ceramic jewelry and pottery are available online and at www.gardendistrictstl.com. Find out more, subscribe to her blog and Instagram at www.creativityforthesoul.com Call her at 314 504-4266