Anemones are only rarely used as bedding plants, which is a pity, because they will sit under other bulbs as a carpet or hold a piece of border on their own. The difficulty with how to grow anemones is that one name covers three plants wanting quite different things. One is a knobbly little thing from the Greek hillsides, one is the big poppy flowered sort the florists sell, and one arrives looking like a dead twig.
Which Anemone Have You Got
Look at what came in the packet, because that settles almost everything else. Blanda corms are small, hard and irregular, about the size of a peanut, and they give low daisy flowers in early spring. Coronaria corms are larger and flatter with a rougher shoulder, and they give the tall poppy shaped flowers on long stems.
Nemorosa is not a corm at all. What arrives is a thin pale brown rhizome, brittle and dry, closer to a piece of dead root than anything you would expect to plant, and a fair number get thrown away every autumn by people who assume the order has gone wrong.
Does The Size Of An Anemone Corm Matter
Not in the way it does with a daffodil, where a bigger bulb is reliably a better bulb. With anemones a sound young corm of moderate size will beat an oversized one that has spent too long in the ground and gone woody, and that is worth knowing when a bargain offer of very large corms appears.
What actually matters is firmness. A good corm is hard and heavy for its size with no soft patches and no sign of mould, and if it gives at all under a thumbnail it has been stored badly and will not do much.
Which Way Up Do Anemone Corms Go
It does not matter, and this is the question we are asked more than any other about anemones. There is no reliable top on an anemone corm, the shape gives you very little to go on, and the shoots will turn themselves round and find the surface whichever way you drop them in.
If you want a rule to follow, lay them on their side and stop thinking about it. Time spent squinting at a corm trying to find a growing point is time better spent getting the spacing right.
Should You Soak Anemone Corms Before Planting
Yes, but for hours rather than overnight, which is where most people go wrong. Three or four hours in tepid water is plenty, and it softens the corm enough to get it going without doing any harm.
Leave them longer and you start to lose them. A corm sitting in water all night and half the next day takes up more than it can use and rots in the ground a fortnight later, so set a timer rather than leaving them to soak while you get on with something else.
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How Deep And How Far Apart Do Anemones Go
Five centimetres deep is right for all of them, and the difference is in the spacing. Give blanda about 7cm each way and coronaria a full 10cm, because coronaria makes a surprisingly vigorous root system and resents being crowded.
Wood anemone rhizomes go shallower, two or three centimetres, and they go in flat rather than upright. Anything deeper and they simply take another year to appear.
How Do You Plant Wood Anemone Rhizomes
Lay them horizontally and get them into the ground the day they arrive. Wood anemone rhizomes have no protective coat and no reserves to speak of, so every week they spend in a paper bag on a shelf comes off the following spring.
They want damp ground and something to grow into. Leaf mould worked into the top few centimetres is the whole trick, and a rhizome put into bare dry soil under a hedge will sulk for years without ever quite dying.
When Do Anemones Flower
Blanda opens first, in March and on into April, and the wood anemones follow through April. Coronaria is the late one, coming in May and June from an autumn planting and carrying on for a month or more once it starts.
Fourteen weeks from planting to the first flower is the figure to work with for coronaria, which is what makes a long season possible to plan rather than to hope for. Count back from when you want them and put the corms in accordingly.
Does Soil pH Matter For Anemones
Far less than people imagine, and drainage matters a great deal more. Anemones grow perfectly well on acid and alkaline ground alike, and wood anemones in particular turn up wild on almost every soil in the country.
We lime and mulch ours in early autumn out of long habit, and on heavy sour ground it does no harm at all. Nobody should be put off growing them because their soil is on the sour side, and nobody needs to buy lime to make them work.
Are Anemones Good As Cut Flowers
Coronaria is one of the best there is, and it repays a small piece of trouble at the sink. Sear the cut ends in boiling water for about fifteen seconds before they go in the vase and they will hold their petals for a week.
Kept somewhere cool they will go on for a fortnight. Cut them as the bud is colouring rather than fully open, because they carry on opening indoors and they close again every evening, which is half the pleasure of having them in the house.
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Do Anemones Come Back Every Year
Blanda and the wood anemones will, and they get better rather than worse, thickening up and seeding themselves about until they cover ground you never planted. Both are worth putting somewhere you will not disturb them.
Coronaria is the uncertain one and depends almost entirely on drainage. On light soil it will come again for several years, while on cold wet clay it behaves like an annual, which is why many people treat it as a cheap bedding crop and simply replant.
What To Plant With Anemones
Match the companions to the anemone rather than to each other, because the three keep quite different company. Blanda belongs under deciduous shrubs with chionodoxa and scilla, all of them low and blue and open at the same moment, with winter aconites ahead of them in February to start the sequence off.
Wood anemones want erythronium in the same light shade, and then English bluebells to take the ground over as the anemone foliage goes under, which is the order they arrive in on a woodland floor anyway. For coronaria in a border, camassia carries the same patch on into May and June as the anemones are finishing.