A dozen pollinator-friendly flowers

Fill your garden with colorful annuals that you and the pollinators can enjoy all season long.

Varieties from All-America Selections (AAS), a non-profit plant- trialing organization, can brighten your garden, attract pollinators.

Attract hummingbirds and second looks from passersby with the vibrant, bright-orange flowers of Canna South Pacific. This compact variety can be started from seed and was selected as a 2018 AAS winner for its vigorous, full and uniform growth habit.

Whether it's spikes of lavender, pink, white or red your garden and container need, you'll find them in the Salvia Jewel series. Watch butterflies and hummingbirds stop by for a sip of nectar and see finches feast upon the seeds later in the season.

Add more vertical interest and pollinator appeal in the garden and large planters with Asian Garden Celosia. The bright-pink blooms hold their color all season long atop sturdy stems, 31 to 40 inches tall.

Include a few Cupheas, also known as Mexican Heather, in containers, borders and mass plantings. Try FloriGlory Diana for plentiful, large blooms in an intense shade of magenta.

Incorporate beauty even in challenging locations with EnduraScape Pink

Bicolor Verbena. As the name implies, it is hardy, tolerating drought, heat and temperatures in the low teens, too. Use this spreader in large containers and baskets where you can appreciate the soft- pink blooms with their darker center.

Lure pollinators to your garden and containers with Vinca Mega Bloom Orchid Halo. The bright- purple blooms with a white eye stand up to heat and humidity without succumbing to disease.

Grow winning varieties of a traditional favorite, zinnia. These low-maintenance, sun-loving annuals can be started from seed directly in the garden. Add vibrant color to the garden with Queeny Lime, Zowie! Yellow Flame and Magellan Coral. Include a smaller-scale beauty with Profusion and Zahara zinnia varieties.

Gardeners and pollinators love purple coneflowers (Echinacea). Two colorful varieties, Cheyenne Spirit and PowWow Wild Berry, will fill your garden with color for seasons to come.

Cheyenne Spirit coneflower produces a mix of purple, pink, red and orange flowers along side lighter yellows, creams and white. This compact plant stands tall in wind and rain and is drought-tolerant once established.

PowWow Wild Berry coneflower lives up to its name. The vivid, deep-rose-purple flowers retain their beautiful color all season long. You'll enjoy continual bloom without deadheading or grooming.

Add more perennial beauty with Twizzle Purple Penstemon. The spikes of vibrant, purple blooms are favorites of hummingbirds and other pollinators. Include them in containers for added height or high-impact color anywhere in the landscape.

Extend your budget and increase perennial plantings next year by starting these three winners indoors by late January. Your efforts will be rewarded with flowers that same season.

And don't let shade stop you from inviting pollinators into the garden. Bounce Pink Flame Impatiens has all the flower power of common impatiens but is resistant to downy mildew. Plus, they are a bit more forgiving if you allow them to wilt. Just add water, and they bounce back.

Plant Sunpatiens Spreading Shell Pink in full sun or shade. Enjoy the season-long, soft-pink flowers even in high heat, rain and humidity. This variety has all the low-maintenance beauty of impatiens but is resistant to downy mildew.

Once you've added these beauties to your landscape, sit back and enjoy. You and the pollinators will reap the many benefits of these winning additions to your gardens and containers.

Why you should plant flowers alongside vegetables

Flowers have a remarkable ability to keep your veggie crop strong and healthy. Here's what you need to do.

When planning a vegetable garden for this summer, be sure to leave space for flowers. Vegetables can benefit from the presence of flowers for a number of reasons -- namely, their ability to attract bees and other pollinators.

Maggie Saska, a gardening specialist at the Rodale Institute's organic farm, says that bringing bees into the garden ensures a better veggie harvest:

"Without bees stopping by your garden to snack on nectar and swap pollen around, you're going to have a pretty disappointing crop."

The benefit goes both ways. Flowers help these struggling populations, too, whose decline have been linked to excessive use of chemicals in agriculture in recent decades, as well as loss of natural habitat. The more places for them to feed and help with pollination, the more secure our entire food production system is.

In an article for Rodale's, Saska explains how to go about choosing the right flowers for your vegetable patch.

1) Look at the bloom time. You'll want the flowers to bloom at the same time as the vegetable crop: "If the flowers you planted don't bloom until two weeks after your peas are done flowering, your peas are out of luck." But, at the same time you want blooms to happen throughout the whole growing season to help all of your plants, so plant a variety of flowers.

2) Look at the flower shape. Did you know that different shapes attract different pollinators, such as hummingbirds, bees, and beneficial wasps? Saska recommends flowers with a 'composite' shape (with petals arranged identically around a center). These could be zinnias, marigolds, cosmos, etc.

3) Think about height. The flowers should not block the sun for the vegetables, so choose low-growing plants. Saska points out, though, that some crops such as lettuce could benefit from a bit more shade at the peak of summer, so a taller flower next to it could be helpful.

4) Choose flowers that repel pests. This piece of advice comes via The Spruce, which admits that studies are inconclusive on this topic, but anecdotal evidence is strong -- and you don't stand to lose anything by having beautiful, colorful flowers in a veggie patch! Some suggestions:

Calendula: repels asparagus beetles and tomato hornworm, can be a trap for aphids
Cosmos: attracts bees and green lacewings, which attack other pests
Lavender: despised by ticks and moths
Marigolds: releases a chemical that kills root nematodes in the soil
Nasturtiums: deter squash bugs and beetles

Did Flowering Plants Evolve On A Lost Continent, Like Darwin Imagined?

In his vast correspondence with other contemporary naturalists, Charles Darwin mentions an “abominable mystery”. This mystery was the origin of angiosperms or plants with flowers. The fossil record showed that flowering plants appear relatively suddenly all around the world in the mid-Cretaceous, in contrast with Darwin's belief of a gradual, slow evolution. Darwin explained the apparent sudden evolution using gaps in the fossil record.

Perhaps, he suggested, the ancestor of modern flowering plants evolved in a remote place, from where the new group quickly spread. Plants with flowers are far more likely to become fertilized, thanks to the help of insects or the wind, can quickly produce seeds and colonize new terrain. So to solve this mystery it was just necessary to find the remote place where the first flowering plants evolved. Darwin proposed an interesting explanation why this place was not found during his lifetime: "I have sometimes fancied that development might have slowly gone for an immense period in some isolated continent or large island, perhaps near the South Pole.”

Darwin speculated that the first flowers evolved on a continent, from there spread over the globe, meanwhile the continent with the transitional fossils disappeared beneath the sea, far out of reach of any fossil collector or naturalist.

Since Darwin, many plant fossils have been found, but the origin of flowering plants still remains elusive. Possible sites of origin of the angiosperms were placed in the Arctic region, Southeast or East Asia, South America and Africa. Some fossil leaves of the Triassic and Jurassic resemble leaves of modern angiosperms but there is no direct evidence to link the fossils to the group. The oldest known fossils of angiosperms, showing some typical parts of a flower, like carpels and stamens (the reproductive organs of a flowering plant) but lacking others, like petals (modified, brightly colored leaves to attract pollinators),  were found in China, dating to the early Cretaceous. Archaefructus, discovered in 1998, was a plant growing in wet environments or even water, as the sediments, where the fossil is preserved, and the morphology of the leaves suggest.

The connection of Archaefructus with water supports also another idea about the evolution of flowering plants. The Cretaceous radiation probably begins somewhere in the wet tropics. The new plants then spread quickly from their place of origin and in just forty million years flowering plants make up already more than seventy-five percent of all known land plants. But according to botanists Archaefructus, despite its primitive traits, cannot be considered the first flowering plant, but just a very basal form, relocating the possible origin of angiosperms outside of China.

A modern discovery may vindicate Darwin's very speculative idea about the true origin of flowering plants. The continent of Zealandia, located east of modern Australia, disappeared in the sea in the late Cretaceous. If the first flowering plants evolved on the lost continent of Zealandia, this would explain the apparent lack of fossil forms.  From Zealandia, maybe with a tropical, wet climate at the time, the new group would quickly spread over Australia and Asia, united at the time in a single landmass, coinciding with the discovery of primitive flowering plants in fossil sites of China and Mongolia. There is also some evidence to support this hypothesis observing the distribution of modern species. Research suggests that Zealandia played an important role to explain the dispersal and evolution of animals, providing a dry land bridge, in the South Pacific. It's likely that also plants used this land bridge.

This is supported by the distribution of flowering plants still sharing some traits with their primitive ancestor.  Many primitive flowering plants are found clustering around the former location of Zealandia, supposed origin of the primitive ancestor.  The genus Amborella is found only on the island of  New Caledonia,  southwest Pacific Ocean. Austrobaileya is found only in the tropical forests of Queensland, Australia. Degeneria, a genus in the family Magnoliaceae, a very old group inside the flowering plants, is only found on Fidschi, a remote island north of New Zealand.

Scented winter flowers

To me there is nothing in the garden that is as uplifting as fragrance, particularly in the darkest depths of winter. Catching an unexpected whiff of the scent of summer on a cold, grey day when dashing out the front door or walking to the bus stop is one of the everyday surprises which makes gardening so magical.

However, as a self-confessed fair-weather gardener who hates the cold, for me there is just one downside to many winter flowering shrubs: you have to get out in the freezing drizzle to actually smell them. I barely last a few minutes at a time. Fortunately, a small handful of these beauties also happen to make excellent cut flowers, so you can surround yourself with the scent of the outdoors all day. Having experimented with loads each winter, I have come up with my top four that smell as good in the house as they do in the garden.

Wintersweet, or Chimonanthus praecox, lives a secret double life as a mild-mannered garden shrub all summer long, with plain green leaves that are easily overlooked. Yet come this time of year, its bare branches erupt into waxy yellow flowers with deep burgundy throats and a scent that will stop you dead in your tracks. Spicy, sweet and intensely fragrant, it is well worth the few years' wait for the plants to reward you with flowers.

If you only have a tiny spot to play with, you couldn't do much better than Daphne bholua, especially if it is overshadowed by trees and tall buildings. These shade-loving, tiny, evergreen shrubs produce delicate white or pink blooms that look like they are made from sugar icing. And the scent – oh, the scent. Deep, rich and classically floral, it reminds me of vintage perfume.

Sarcococca hookeriana is another excellent candidate for smaller, shady spots, producing a jasmine-like scent so powerful you will almost certainly smell it before you see it.

Last but not least comes Viburnum x bodnantense, a large shrub with small pompoms in delicate white or pastel pink. With its extremely long flowering season, starting from mid-autumn until early spring, you'll get a conveyor of scented blooms right when you need them most.

No garden? No problem

Even if you don't have any outside space at all, there are many winter flowering house plants you can grow for unbeatable fragrance indoors. I am a huge fan of the ivory, scented flowers of trailing cactus Epiphyllum anguliger, with its mad, fishbone-shaped foliage. For lovers of the classics there are always the white, rose-like flowers of gardenia, with an infamously intense perfume and the old-school bridal bouquet favourite of stephanotis, whose lighter, fresher scent can still fill a room.