Annuals

 Click here to see some common annuals
 

The term annual is applied to garden flowers that complete their life cycle in the span of one growing season. This means they come up in the spring, grow, flower quickly for a long season of blooms, set seed and then die after the frosts in the fall.

There are many plants used as annuals in Ohio  that are in fact perennial in the south where they do not experience the damaging effects of frost. These tender perennials used as annuals include geranium, vinca, coleus, and lantana. To save these plants from year to year, they would need to be dug up, potted and brought indoors or cuttings taken from the plants, rooted, and the resulting plants overwintered indoors.

There are a number of annuals that may act like perennials because of the large amount of seed they drop in the fall. New plants emerge from seed around the area the annual was planted the previous season. Plants like cleome, snapdragon, and  melampodium are  examples.