Seeds of faith

In bleak mid-winter Anna Pavord looks forward to some exotic summer visitors: among them 'Jewel of Africa', 'Hippy Mixed' and 'Zulu Prince'

There is ice on the inside of the study window, and I am looking at a packet of Venidium 'Zulu Prince', in a kind of disbelief that flowers like this could ever exist in the garden. A blue tit is swinging from the blackened six-foot stalk of a sunflower in the border outside. Even the tough old hellebores have crumpled up with cold and here am I planning to grow South African daisies, bred on the veldt, while the thermometer hauls itself up to a grudging 25F.

Venidiums are unusual among annual flowers in having good leaves. Annuals don't usually bother much about their foliage. Most of them are hell-bent on setting seed, which means hanging out a flower seductive enough to tempt a passing insect from the straight and narrow, without resorting to leaves. But these "monarchs of the veldt", as they are called, have deeply lobed leaves, silvery white and rather woolly in texture.

The flowers are usually a rich saturated orange, but 'Zulu Prince' (Thompson & Morgan, pounds 1.59) has creamy white flowers, the petals arranged - rather like a sunflower's - around a dark central disc. Well grown, they can be up to four inches across on plants about two feet high, doing best in light, sandy soil in a sunny spot.

For summer flowering outside, you need to sow the seeds in March or April, scattering them on the surface of a five-inch pot of compost and covering them very thinly with more compost or vermiculite. I generally wrap pots in clingfilm to keep the compost moist. Germination will take between two and three weeks at a temperature of around 60-65F. Prick the seedlings into individual three-inch pots and grow them until the weather is warm enough for them to be set outside. They will flower until the first frosts.

Venidiums also make good early spring pot plants for a frost-free conservatory. For this, you need to sow in August or September and shift the plants eventually into five- or six-inch pots of compost, where they can stay until they have finished flowering.

The foxgloves I sowed in mid-June came to nothing. A mole homed in on the seedbed and piggy-backed foxgloves, asters, catananche and polemonium so dizzily around the area that they never recovered. So I'll have to start again this year. I fancy 'The Shirley' (Chiltern, 98p), with vast spikes of pink, cream and plum, spotted and blotched with darker colours and 'Apricot' (Chiltern, 84p) which has slightly smaller spikes of soft, creamy apricot.

Thompson & Morgan is introducing a climbing nasturtium with variegated leaves, the 'Jewel of Africa' (pounds 1.89), which fills an important gap and is on my list this year.

'Alaska' has been the usual choice if you wanted a variegated nasturtium, but that is a bush, not a climber. 'Jewel of Africa' has flowers in mixed colours: orange, red and yellow. Seeds are easy to grow, sown singly in three-inch pots, then wrapped in clingfilm until they germinate. I sowed the dark-leaved 'Empress of India' on 9 May last year and it flowered prodigiously all summer, sharing a hot bit of the bank with the English pot marigold, 'Touch of Red'.

Among their new perennials, Thompson & Morgan is also offering seed of a herbaceous geranium, G pratense striatum (pounds 2.99), which I had from a friend a few years ago. It has the useful ground-covering habit of all this tribe, and the flowers are like willow-pattern china, the white petals streaked and striped with blue. Some of the petals are neatly divided down the middle, white one side, blue the other. I'm going to raise some more plants to set in long grass. Cranesbills, the plain blue kind, grow quite vigorously along roadside verges, though they seem to do better on the high chalklands than they do in our clay-lined lanes. In the garden they haul themselves up through the lower branches of the musk rose 'Felicia', which has pale trusses of pinkish-apricot flowers.

Suttons is introducing a new tobacco flower called 'Hippy Mixed' (pounds 1.99), which is neither scentless nor dwarf - two steps in the right direction. The flowers are a mixture of crimson, rose, purple and white and the plants go up to about two feet. I sowed tobacco flowers on the 26 March last year and had four trayfuls of plants to put out among the artemisias in the front borders. As with venidiums, you should sow as thinly as possible in a pot, but do not cover the seeds with compost. They need light for germination, which should happen within two weeks. Wrap the pot in clingfilm after you have watered it and allowed it to drain. Keep it at a temperature of around 65F until the seeds have sprouted.

Chilterns has the species Nicotiana affinis (89p), which may have contributed its two-penn'orth to the 'Hippy Mixed' strain of tobacco plants, for it is tall and beautifully scented. It grows to about three feet and has star-shaped white flowers which continue until the first frosts. These were once popular conservatory plants, potted up into individual pots. Treated this way and kept frost-free, they revert to being perennials as they are in their native Brazil.

Morning glory can also be used to decorate greenhouses and conservatories, though it does equally well on a sunny wall outside, where it will climb eight to 10 feet. The most important thing, if you are growing it outside, is not to be in too much of a hurry. The seedlings sulk spectacularly if you put them out too early, when the nights are still chilly, and then get so stuck in sulking mode they never recover. You will know if this has happened because all colour drains out of the leaves.

Suttons has the morning glory Ipomoea rubro-coerulea, 'Heavenly Blue' (95p), which you could sow in April, setting each seed in a separate three- inch pot wrapped in clingfilm. Soak the seed overnight first to soften the hard seed coat. Germination will take anything from 10-15 days, but the temperature needs to be high, around 70F. Grow the plants with plenty of light but not too much heat, transplanting them if necessary into bigger pots before hardening them off gradually. During this period, they may need staking. If you want to grow them in a conservatory, the plants should be potted again into eight-inch pots.

Convolvulus tricolor has funnel-shaped flowers which, like morning glory's, fade by the afternoon, but are much smaller. They are born in the leaf axils of bushy plants, about 12-15in high. 'Flagship Mixed' (Mr Fothergills, pounds 1.35) has trumpet flowers of red, white, blue and pink, all with a white eye. Sow in late March and prick out the seedlings into boxes of compost. Harden the plants off gradually in a cold frame before planting them out in May. They can be massed together in containers, or grown as an edging to a sunny path.

Chiltern Seeds, Bortree Stile, Ulverston, Cumbria LA12 7PB (01229 581137)

Mr Fothergill's, Gazeley Rd, Kentford, Newmarket, Suffolk CB8 7QB (01638 751161)

Sutton Seeds, Hele Rd, Torquay, Devon TQ2 7QJ (01803 614455) Thompson & Morgan, Poplar Lane, Ipswich, Suffolk IP8 3BU (01473 688821)