How To Sow Garden Fairies

This year if you plant only one annual that flowers in late winter and spring, make it a colour cloud of lots of Primula malacoides (fairy primrose).

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These cool-weather beauties have a delicate appearance, with their furry and textured leaf rosettes and slender flower stalks bearing tiers of flowers with heart-shaped petals in shades of white, rose, pink, lavender, purple and burgundy, but they are surprisingly tough and quite easy to propagate from seed.

How to use your fairies

The fairy primrose is one of the first little flowering plants to sniff that spring might be in the air, and will start flowering even in midwinter depending on the time they were planted. They can flower from May to October.

The best way to show them off is to plant them in masses in flower borders, but they also combine very well with spring-flowering bulbs like daffodils and with other annuals such as violas, pansies, phloxes and Iceland poppies.

If you have a glut of fairy primula seedlings, grow some in pots to display inside the home. Simply place the pots inside a large container or basket and add some moss around it to emulate a woodland scene in a cool room with good light.

Do this: