Plants with tiny flowers are delights

I confess to a love of the Lilliputian, a delight in the diminutive, an inclination toward the infinitesimal. I love those little mats and mounds of flowers that are built to spill over the sidewalk, to soften the hardened path and fringe the edge of the garden bed.

For those of us who spend an inordinate amount of time on our knees tugging at the undesirable elements of our flora, these little flowers that grow hardly higher than the soles of our shoes are intimate companions.

Today, I would like to celebrate two of these -- creeping zinnias and portulaca. Both are annuals that are easy to grow from seed and offer a long season of color.

Sanvitalia procumbens is called the creeping zinnia, but I have always had a bit of trouble with this name. There is already a true zinnia, which sort of creeps about, Zinnia angustifolia, and, besides, the creeping zinnia looks to me more like a tiny sunflower. Flowers about the size of a nickel are composed of a circle of bright-yellow ray petals surrounding a dark-chocolate disc. So we will call it Sanvitalia even though that sounds like some sort of hair cream. It was named for an Italian botanist, Federico Sanvitali.

Seemingly built for hot, dry weather, this plant has a sunny disposition -- cheerful, bright and accommodating. A pinch of seed will yield plants that will eventually spread out to mats that are at least a foot across and only a few inches high. Plantings of about a foot apart will meet to form continuous carpets of radiant, low-effort flowers. Punctuating them among taller plants is effective. Hailing from Mexico and Guatemala, sanvitalia can take drought conditions in stride.

Portulaca grandiflora, or moss rose, is one of those plants that I had mildly disdained before I grew it. I guess I had seen one too many sullen-looking hanging baskets hovering over the half-dead petunias in mid-August at the big-box stores. Or maybe I had associated it with its near cousin Portulaca oleracea, an all-too-common weed that most of us know as purslane. If that wasn't enough, moss rose has the habit of opening for a brief period in mid-morning, then snapping shut for the rest of the day, not a great plant for the working class.

A free packet of portulaca seed was sent to me a few years ago with a seed order, and since I needed something small to fill in one spot, I decided to give them the benefit of a more just opinion. At the risk of being swift-boated, I hereby officially change my mind. These plants have been well-behaved, absolutely no-maintenance and, best of all, quite beautiful. The cultivar called Warm Gold, has golden-yellow flowers with bronze tones and a few red highlights. They are about the size of a quarter.

Plant breeders have toyed with portaluca's habit of folding up midday, and now most modern portulaca keep their eyes open well into the afternoon. They have also transformed the flowers from puny little star-shaped things by doubling the amount of petals. While this sort of improvement can sometimes turn graceful flowers into turkey drumsticks, in the case of portulaca it has worked beautifully.

The color selection has gotten better too, with more pastels and deep, saturated colors. I am also happy to see the seed offered in individual colors to avoid the cheesy, kids-birthday-party effect that the mix of old colors tended toward. There is a crystalline quality to portulaca flowers that one encounters elsewhere only in cactus flowers.

Portulaca have needlelike succulent leaves on equally succulent stems. As you might have guessed from the succulent quality of the plant, it is not only drought-tolerant but also requires a free-draining dry soil to thrive without disease problems. This makes it an ideal edging and container subject, and it also makes it the perfect companion for sanvitalia.

Ladies and gentlemen, I stand corrected.

-- If you have a gardening question or story idea, write to David Bare in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, NC 27101-3159, or send e-mail to his attention to gardening@wsjournal.com.