Easily Fill Your Garden With Colorful Blooms With This Fast-Growing, Self-Seeding Flower

There are many plants in your garden which have slow and steady growth and reward your hard work and patience. Sometimes though, you need a flower that can quickly and easily give your garden a colorful boost of blooms in perpetuity while requiring little effort on your part. For this, look no further than love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena).

Native to the Mediterranean and Middle East, love-in-a-mist is the perfect annual for adding quick color to spring and fall gardens. Their blooms range in color from blues and purples to pinks and whites. And their frothy delicate foliage adds a whimsical quality as well as creating the "mist" the flowers are named for. After they are done flowering, their seed pods provide an interesting textural element to enjoy. If you leave their pods intact, they readily self-seed as well, providing you with additional flowers in years to come.

Love-in-a-mist grows easily from seed, and while it can be started indoors and transplanted out, it grows best when direct sowed. Simply scatter the seeds as soon as your soil starts to thaw. Love-in-a-mist is frost tolerant, so there's no need to wait until after your last frost. If you have a long and cool spring and summer, you can even plant more seeds every few weeks to ensure blooms keep coming all season. With how easy and eye-catching the flower is, it's no wonder The Old Farmer's Almanac also recommends growing it.

Make sure to plant your love-in-a-mist in a spot with plenty of sun. Additionally, while it can grow in average soil, it does best in more fertile growing media. You should also make sure the soil is well-draining. Love-in-a-mist flowers like only moderate amounts of moisture, so depending on what your spring weather is like, they may need little to no additional watering. They're even somewhat drought tolerant once established. With a height of about 2 ½ feet or less, love-in-a-mist is perfect for the middle of gardens, with smaller spring flowers like violas in front of it and taller plants and shrubs behind it.

While your love-in-a-mist may not tolerate the hot summer months, you can always plant another round in late summer to enjoy blooms during the cooler fall weather. If you'd prefer not to have your love-in-a-mist self-seed or are concerned about overcrowding in your garden, then be sure to deadhead them before the plants form seed pods. You can also collect the seeds and either save them to spread in a different part of your garden, or even use them for culinary purposes. The dried pods also go really well in dried-flower arrangements!