Cornflower

The classic lawn daisy: a low, rosette-forming perennial with spoon-shaped leaves and white, often pink-tipped ray flowers around a yellow disc on short stems, blooming from spring into autumn. The flowers close at night and in rain - the old "day's eye" - and double cool-season bedding forms such as "Pomponette" and "Habanera" are widely grown. Often written off as a lawn weed, it is in fact a tough, charming, child's-favourite groundcover that flowers for months, thrives in mown grass because it keeps its blooms low, and offers easy early-season nectar and pollen. The flowers and young leaves are edible.

An old garden-favorite annual native to Mexico, grown for showy daisy-like flowers in nearly every color but true blue - red, yellow, orange, pink, rose, lavender, green, and white. Bushy, leafy plants rise on upright, hairy, branching stems and bloom continuously from early summer to frost. A magnet for butterflies and hummingbirds, and one of the most reliable cut-and-come-again cutting-garden flowers.

A fast, low-maintenance warm-weather annual from Mexico and the southern United States, grown for saucer-shaped, daisy-like flowers (2 to 4 inches across) with red, pink or white rays around a yellow center. The lacy, threadlike bipinnate foliage gives an airy texture, and the long bloom run from early summer to frost makes it a workhorse for cutting and cottage gardens. It flowers best in lean soil - overly rich, fertile ground produces leafy plants with fewer blooms.

The first thing to settle about plains coreopsis is the thing seed racks are vaguest about: it is an ANNUAL. Missouri Botanical Garden types it that way without hedging, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center calls it an annual in its first line, and the plant germinates, flowers, sets seed and dies inside one season. That single fact separates it from the other two coreopsis in this group. Lanceleaf coreopsis and largeflower coreopsis are true perennials that gardeners routinely expect to be long-lived and that are not quite: MBG says lanceleaf needs dividing every two or three years in a border to stay robust; threadleaf coreopsis, already in this catalogue, is the one that genuinely persists. Plains coreopsis persists differently - not as a plant but as a seed bank. It self-sows heavily, and a stand that looks permanent after five years is five generations, not one plant, which is why it is the coreopsis for a meadow sowing and the wrong one for a slot in a border where something has to be there next April. What you get for accepting that is the best flower in the genus for the money. Solitary daisies one to two inches across, seven to nine bright yellow rays each painted maroon at the base around a red-brown disc, carried in quantity on wiry branching stems above finely cut foliage. MBG rates it showy and good for cutting, lists no serious insect or disease problems, and puts its maintenance at low. It is the plant behind most of the yellow in a roadside wildflower mix. Two cautions belong next to that. It self-seeds hard enough that MBG recommends deadheading specifically to prevent it, and it has naturalised across nearly fifty territories outside its home range, from Britain and Poland to Japan, Java and Fiji - so treat spare seed as something to bin rather than scatter. And the two best sources disagree about water: MBG grows it dry to medium and calls it drought tolerant, while the Wildflower Center rates its water use HIGH and says the good years are the wet ones. Both are describing the same plant honestly, and the record below explains why.

The California state flower - a drought-tolerant southwestern native perennial (grown as annual outside zones 8-10) producing iconic vibrant orange (sometimes yellow, pink, red, or white in cultivars) cup-shaped flowers that open in sun and close at night or in cloudy weather. Naturalizes readily via self-seeding; among the most reliable hot-dry-site wildflowers for borders, meadow plantings, and rock gardens. Family Papaveraceae but unrelated to the opium poppy (different chemistry, no narcotic alkaloids).

A hairy-stemmed hardy annual of cornfields and disturbed ground, the common poppy bears finely cut leaves and brilliant scarlet, papery, four-petalled flowers - often with a dark basal blotch - in early summer, followed by the iconic pepper-pot seed capsule. This is the remembrance / Flanders poppy. Important and load-bearing: it is NOT the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) but a different species, and its seeds are NOT the culinary "poppy seeds" of that plant; it contains only mild alkaloids (rhoeadine) and the green plant is regarded as mildly toxic, so treat it as inedible and ornamental rather than a food crop. It is a true annual that self-seeds prolifically and needs open, disturbed soil to germinate - sow it in situ where it is to flower, as it dislikes transplanting. The flowers offer pollen but little nectar, so bees work them for pollen.