Calendula Art Shades Mixed

Most pot marigolds are a flat carnival orange. Art Shades is deliberately softer: apricot, cream, pale peach and warm buff, on bushy plants at 60cm flowering from June to the first hard frosts.

The mix gives you a range of flower forms as well as colours, from fully double through semi-double to plain single. That is worth knowing before you sow, because the singles are the ones the bees can actually use. A fully double calendula has petals where the nectar should be. A row of Art Shades will feed pollinators, but not as well as a row of singles would.

Being a mix, it also throws the occasional plain bright orange, and the more it self-seeds around your garden the more of those you will get. The soft shades are the selected end of a species that wants to be orange, and left alone it drifts back. Save seed only from the palest plants if you want to hold the palette. The petals are edible and it is one of the easiest things a beginner can grow.