Whether you are a gardener or not, you have probably purchased and planted some "annuals" around your landscape. Technically, annuals are plants that go from seed to seed in one year. However, like so many terms it has been expanded over the years to include a wide variety of plants that we use to enhance our landscapes.

This umbrella term today covers both annuals and plants that are supposed to live two or more years that we call perennials. The reason for the inclusion of two types of plants under one name is the weather. A perennial will live more than two years but only in an environment that allows it to survive the weather to make it into a second, third or more years. So, when we install perennials that are not hardy for our particular climate, they ACT as if they were annuals and die at the end of the year.

What this all boils down to is that we now include a class of plants called tender perennials in the commonly used term, annuals. These perennials come from tropical or subtropical regions of the world. They will work fine in our gardens during the warmth of the late spring, summer and fall but they cannot survive a killing frost. So, unlike perennials adapted to our climate, they must be replanted, like annuals, every spring.

Here are some classifications for using annuals in the home landscape: