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Unusual annuals

There are some unusual annuals out there this time of year and this is one of my favorites, Acanthus mollus, or Bear's Breeches. If you saw this plant without the flowers starting to grow in your garden, and somebody else had planted it, you probably would have pulled it up.

It looks so weed-like by the leaves. It looks like a thistle, but grows up about three feet tall,  and it has these beautiful flower stalks that come up and produce these foxglove or a monks hood-like flowers. You can get different colored versions of it, the one thing you have to watch is it looks like a thistle and it kind of feels like a thistle. If you put your hand around the stem, you'll notice there's some thorns down there. You have to be a little careful handling it, but it's really a kind of cool plant to put it in your annual garden for something that will be a showstopper!

If you wanted something really unusual, how about a house plant used as an annual flower in your garden? These purple plants are called purple hearts. They're commonly grown as a house plant, but what you can do is snip off a piece of their shoots and stuck them in the ground and they'll get rooted! Now they can grow as a ground cover all summer long! They provide a nice color and they'll have beautiful pink flowers too by mid-summer.
 
Finally, you have to always remember that annuals can self-sow. And this is what happens to Strobilanthes, Persian Shield, from last year. It's just a field of it now. You can thin it out and keep it, or just get rid of the whole thing! But always watch out for some annuals that love to set their seeds for next year and the year after.
 
By Charlie Nardozzi