Tips and Growing Instructions: Allium

Easy-to-grow alliums provide one of the most effective ways to ensure continuing colour and beauty in your garden after spring-flowering bulbs have faded. While you wait for the cheery blooms of summer flowers, it's easy to enjoy the outstanding features of alliums:

• Exceptionally easy to grow with little concern for soil conditions.
• Intriguing, unique character of blooms that are a delight to behold .
• Great ornamental value after flowering because flower heads continue to provide an interesting display    even after colors have faded.
• Great in dried arrangements.
• Ability to naturalize exceptionally well by multiplying year after year for increased beauty.
• Distasteful flavour for animals, so they won¹t eat any part of them.
• Attractive to hummingbirds!

Alliums come in all shapes and sizes and are lots of fun to grow. They fit into almost any garden setting and provide a much-needed bridge of color between spring and summer flowers. Sometimes called "ornamental onions," alliums do best in full sun with well-drained, fertile soil and good moisture. Plant them in September or October about 20-25 cm deep. Allium really look best in the company of other summer bloomers. Sweet alyssum, rock cress, bachelor's buttons, coreopsis, sweet William, foxglove, baby's breath, daylily , iris, red hot poker, coralberry, barberry, Japanese maple, Deutzia rosea, weigela and Geranium pratense are just some of the companion plants that look fantastic with alliums.

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