Bedding Plants

Bedding plants is a term you don't hear as often anymore and which always seemed a little elusive  to me.  I guess you put bedding plants in a flower bed, right?  But don't you put all plants in a flower bed?  Why are annuals called bedding plants and perennials aren't.   Then I stumbled across it in a context where it suddenly made perfect sense.  Why would we refer to annuals as "bedding plants"?  Because of the Victorian love of formal gardens and a style of gardening called "carpet-bedding"

From The English Garden:

An informal English Cottage Garden

Bedding schemes were seen as the height of style in the mid- to late 19th century. Any gardener with a semblance of horticultural ambition took pride in his ‘bedding border’, often inspired by a growing number of paint-by-number designs in emerging gardening magazines. The practice of ‘bedding out’ goes back to the 17th century, when formal parterres were filled with greenhouse-raised flowers in spring and summer. But it was in the Victorian era that it reached its zenith, stimulated by an abundance of newly discovered exotic bedding plants such as heliotropes, pelargoniums, petunias, verbenas and salvias, raised in state-of-the-art conservatories and greenhouses.

To create these intricate formal designs you had to have a dense, compact plant that grew and bloomed consistently: marigolds, wax begonias, coleus, dusty miller, verbena, salvia.  You didn't need the tall cottage garden plants like hollyhocks, snapdragons, lupines.  You weren't creating a flower border or garden you were creating a flower "bed" and you needed bedding plants.  

Elenor Perenyi writes in her book Green Thoughts that "they quickly became the basis for the only really hideous gardening style on record.  In England it was called carpet-bedding because the low growing plants could be packed into patterns like those of an Oriental rug-but also be made to spell out mottoes, depict clocks and maps, even the human face."

Actually I like the style.  I think it is creative and artistic.  It not only requires a lot of planning, but also a lot of upkeep.  If I were an English gardener employed by a large estate, I might also pass my time making pictures with flower.  I might even do it with my lettuce.  But then I could never pick my lettuce!

Lettuce plants laid out in a carpet bed design