… and Sweet William
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- June
- 14
No, not me, the plant! Like daisies, they offer no-maintenance, self-seeding flowers that look great in a wildflower bed.
It’s been a terrific and reliable bloomer for me. I get more and more returning plants and self-seeders every year.
And deer have never bothered a single plant.
It seems to grow just about anywhere that offers well-drained soil. The books all say to give it lots of sun, but here are some that I have in almost complete shade.
Sweet William is a biennial in the dianthus family (pinks, carnations). The first year you get low mounds of grass-like foliage and then bright blooms in a range of colors  pink, red, purple, white and violet, sometimes with bicolored blooms  the second year.
It sometimes blooms again the next year, or just let it go to seed and move about the garden.
You get long-lasting, fragrant flowers for cutting, and it also works well for dried flower arrangements. It has a mild, clove-like scent when you brush against it.
Because of pending construction projects, I moved several sweet Williams out of my wildflower meadow last fall and into shrub and perennial borders. I discovered they look great in more formal settings, too. (The yellow blooms are a groundcover sedum.)
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I can’t wait to move more this fall.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 4:10 pm by Bill Cary.
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Bill Cary grew up in Louisville, Ky. His gardening was limited to growing parsley and impatiens on the windowsill of Manhattan walkups until the mid-1990s when he bought a rundown old chicken farm on 8 acres in the Hudson Valley. Now he spends his weekends chasing deer, hacking away at invasive shrubs and vines and wondering why he doesn`t have more meadow and less lawn.
