Cottage love

Cottage love

If you’re a fan of the cottage garden style of gardening, you can’t look past love in a mist. It has been commonly grown in cottage gardens for over 100 years and is perfect for creating the informal and charming style that makes this look so popular.

Use it to fill in gaps or to create mass beddings of pretty, and delightful blue flowers. Team it up with other complementary flowers like hollyhock, Canterbury bells, cosmos and sweet william or try growing our cottage garden mix which also includes plants like those I’ve just listed.

You can order love in a mist (technically known as nigella) from our online store at www.awapuni.co.nz or pick up a bundle or two of plants next time you’re at one of our local stockists.

Next you need to find a sunny and dry spot (preferably with free-draining soil) to plant. If you have roses, you could grow some love in a mist amongst these. They both like the same conditions so grow well next to each other.

Dig a small hole and plant each seedling around 15cm apart from the next. The trick is to plant each seedling far enough away to allow room to grow without the plants being too spread apart so you end up with gaps.

Each seedling will grow to around 40cm high and start flowering around six weeks after planted. To extend the flowering season, I suggest deadheading (taking off any dead flower heads) and planting another round of seedlings a few weeks later. Or let the flowers go to seed (the seed heads are also very attractive) and they’ll regrow next season.

Henri Ham
Awapuni Nurseries
www.awapuni.co.nz

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