Annual Plant

Annual Plant

In gardening, annual often refers to a plant grown outdoors in the spring and summer and surviving just for one growing season. Many food plants are, or are grown as, annuals, including virtually all domesticated grains. Some perennials and biennials are grown in gardens as annuals for convenience, particularly if they are not considered cold hardy for the local climate. Carrot, celery and parsley are true biennials that are usually grown as annual crops for their edible roots, petioles and leaves, respectively. Tomato, sweet potato and bell pepper are tender perennials usually grown as annuals.

Ornamental annual perennials commonly grown as annuals are impatiens, wax begonia, snapdragon, Pelargonium, coleus and petunia.

One seed-to-seed life cycle for an annual can occur in as little as a month in some species, though most last several months. Oilseed rapa can go from seed-to-seed in about five weeks under a bank of fluorescent lamps. This style of growing is often used in classrooms for education. Many desert annuals are therophytes, because their seed-to-seed life cycle is only weeks and they spend most of the year as seeds to survive dry conditions.

Examples of true annuals include corn, wheat, rice, lettuce, peas, watermelon, beans, zinnia and marigold.

Read more about Annual Plant:  Summer, Winter, Molecular Genetics

Famous quotes containing the words annual and/or plant:

    Time that scatters hair upon a head
    Spreads the ice sheet on the shaven lawn;
    Signing an annual permit for the frost....
    Philip Larkin (1922–1986)

    I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side,... to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)