Popular for their brightly coloured flowers and delightful fragrance, wallflowers, or Erysimum, are excellent flowers for your garden. To get this flashy flower growing in your green space, we’ve gathered all our gardening know-how right here for you.
Whether you’re looking for care tips, or how to seed wallflowers, we’ll have it all in this post. Read on for all the info on how to seed, plant, and care for them.
Vibrant and colourful wallflowers
So what makes a wallflower great for your garden?
For starters, there are a lot of wallflowers to choose from! You can get wallflowers as annuals, biennials, and perennials giving you lots of options on how you want your garden to grow. The varieties all sport bright colours, coming in shades of pink, purple, yellow, and orange.
Wallflowers also tend to stick around a while, meaning their bright flowers keep your garden colourful for longer. Flowering in early spring their flowers last right through to late summer, with some varieties lasting even further into autumn. Popular varieties like Bowles’s Mauve even flower as long as 9 months of the year.
Gardeners of all abilities will be able to look after these flowers as they are easy to care for. Straightforward to plant, wallflowers require little maintenance with general deadheading and trimming keeping them full of flowers. Coupled with regular liquid feeds, wallflowers will look lovely in your garden, with the low effort required.
Several wallflower varieties also produce a sweet fragrance as they flower filling your garden with a pleasant scent. Not only will you be adding a lovely smell to your garden, but it’ll also bring out the neighbours! Pollinators are particularly fond of many wallflower varieties that bring nature out in full force.
Sowing wallflowers
Sowing your wallflowers can be a great way to grow your own from your garden. When sowing wallflowers you can grow either sow straight into the soil outside or in a greenhouse inside.
When growing inside a greenhouse sow your wallflower seeds in seed trays, or an equivalent, with compost and place them inside a polyethylene bag. Let them grow until they are large enough to handle and then move them into pots. Once repotted you can let them grow on before planting them in your garden.
When planting outside make sure to sow it in a sunny position with well-drained soil. Sow into the soil about 13mm into the ground and space the seeds around 30cm apart. Water your wallflower seeds well and regularly, making sure to water them in dry spells. When they have grown large enough to handle, move them to your desired spot in the garden.
Planting Wallflowers
Whether you’ve grown your wallflowers from seeds or picked them up as young plants, it’s time to get them in the ground. Wallflowers do well in moist but well-drained soil. Give them a sunny location, although they will tolerate partial shade. Make sure to plant them around 30cm apart from each other to allow them to grow.
Wallflowers pair really well with other spring-flowering plants for lots of bold colours.
Biennial wallflowers, like Winter Orchid, pair really well with your spring-flowering bulbs to add bright spring colours. The best time to plant them is in September or October.
Perennial wallflowers, like Bowles Mauve, work well in the front of a mixed border to give it height and colour. You can plant them all year round, but the best time is in spring.
Wallflowers can fit into many garden styles and types. They work well in flower beds and borders, containers, pots, and bedding displays. Wallflowers make perfect additions to cottage gardens, and city and courtyard gardens.
Caring for Wallflowers
Wallflowers are nice and easy to care for, suited to any level of gardener. Wallflowers enjoy regular watering, as stated earlier, especially in any dry spells. Try to keep their soil or compost moist, especially when they flower, to keep them healthy. Regular watering and liquid feeds can help to keep your wallflowers flowering longer.
Deadheading your wallflowers will also help, keeping your garden colourful. Deadhead biennial wallflowers after their flowers begin to fade. For perennial wallflowers, cut them back after they flower to keep them a compact shape and encourage further flowering.
Perennial wallflowers are quite short-lived, so taking cuttings can cover you against any losses. Watch out for club root disease, wallflowers are susceptible to this specific fungus. Look for any stunted growth and swollen roots.
Propagation
An easy plant to propagate, wallflowers can be propagated by seed for biennial varieties, and by cuttings for perennial varieties. Biennial wallflowers will self-seed in the right conditions. Perennial wallflowers are sterile so will produce seeds, hence the use of cuttings. Take a 10cm cutting in late spring or early summer.
The 4 best Wallflower varieties
There are many varieties of Erysimum to choose from, so here are our top picks of wallflowers to check out.
1. Bowles Mauve
A popular variety, the dainty clusters of purple flowers are perfect in a mixed border. Flowering from Spring to Summer, it’s also semi-evergreen.
2. Winter Passion
Its eye-catching flowers flower in red and fade to purple over time making for quite the display. Loved by pollinators they flower from spring to autumn.
3. Red Jep
The pink, purple and (unsurprisingly) red shades of Red Jep makes it an unmistakable variety to add to your garden. Flowering from spring to summer it works in mixed borders and rock gardens.
4. Fragrant Sunshine
One of the brightest wallflowers, the dazzling yellow shade lights up your garden. Flowering through spring and summer it’s a perfect choice for a mixed border.
That brings our ultimate guide on wallflowers to a close! We’ve covered everything from how to sow, grow, and plant your wallflowers, propagation, and care, and gave you a few varieties to check out. For more gardening know-how check out our other knowledge-packed blog posts.
Check out our range of wallflowers, perennials and bedding plants, right here at Primrose