Two spring classics worth growing from scratch

The cowslip and the primrose are among the most generous plants a UK garden can hold. They open their flowers in March and April, often before much else has stirred, and they do it without any fuss over soil or feeding. Both are natives, both are food plants as well as nectar sources, and both are declining in the wider countryside as old meadows and hedgerow banks disappear.

Growing them from seed is rewarding in a way that buying a tray of plugs never quite is. You get plenty of plants for very little money, you can raise a local, genetically varied stock, and you can spread them along a verge, under a hedge or through a patch of rough grass. The one thing they ask for is patience: seed sown this summer will flower properly in the spring after next.

Start with genuinely fresh seed

Primula seed is short-lived. Packets that have sat in a warm drawer for a year or more often germinate poorly, if at all, and that is the main reason people give up on these plants. Fresh is everything.

The best seed is from your own plants, or from a friend's garden, or from a wildflower patch with the landowner's permission. Collect the capsules just as they turn brown and begin to split, usually late May to June for primroses and June to July for cowslips. Tip them into a paper envelope and label it. Never dig plants up from the wild — it is illegal to uproot wild plants without permission, and the plants seldom settle anyway.

• Sow within a few days of collecting if you can, straight into pots kept outdoors.
• If you must store seed, keep it somewhere cool and dry, and sow it by early autumn.
• Older seed can still be coaxed into life with a spell of cold, damp conditions, but expect a thinner result.

Sowing cowslips

Cowslips want what a sunny, free-draining bank offers: light soil, plenty of grit, and no competition from coarse grass. Use a loam-based compost mixed with about a third horticultural grit, and sow into pots or deep modules rather than a seed tray — they resent root disturbance and the taproot goes down quickly.

Sprinkle the seed thinly on the surface and cover with just a whisper of fine grit. They need light to germinate, so no deep burying. Water from below by standing the pot in a tray, then put it in a cold frame or a shaded corner outdoors. Fresh seed often germinates in autumn; stored seed usually waits for the cold of winter and comes up in March or April. Germination is famously uneven, so keep the pot for a full year before deciding it has failed.

Sowing primroses

Primroses are the woodland edge of the pair. Give them a shadier spot, a slightly richer compost, and soil that stays reasonably moist without sitting wet. A north-facing border, the foot of a hedge, or the shaded side of a shed all suit them well.

Sow them the same way — surface-sown, barely covered, kept cool and out of direct sun. A sheet of glass or a clear plastic lid over the pot helps hold humidity, but lift it for a few minutes each day to let air move and prevent damping off. Germination is slow and staggered, often beginning as temperatures fall in autumn and continuing into the following spring. Do not tip out a pot that looks empty; the seedlings are tiny at first and easy to miss among the grit.

Caring for seedlings through their first year

Once seedlings have two or three true leaves and are large enough to handle, prick them out into individual 7–9cm pots. Lift them by a leaf rather than the stem, which bruises easily, and firm them in gently.

• Grow them on in a cool, shaded spot, never in full summer sun.
• Water regularly — small pots dry out fast in June and July.
• Keep them outdoors over winter; both species are fully hardy and benefit from the cold.
• Plant out in early autumn or the following spring, watering well and spacing them roughly 20–30cm apart.
• Water through the first dry spell after planting, then leave them to it.

What they give back, and how to let them spread

Cowslips are one of the best early sources of nectar for queen bumblebees, solitary bees and bee-flies emerging from winter, and they are the larval food plant of the Duke of Burgundy fritillary, now desperately scarce. Primroses feed brimstones, bumblebee queens and a suite of night-flying moths, and their dense rosettes shelter overwintering insects at ground level.

The easiest way to build a colony is to stop tidying. Let the flowers set seed and do not deadhead them; the capsules will scatter around the parent plants and seedlings will appear in the gaps. Leave the rosettes intact over winter rather than cutting them back, avoid mulching over them, and mow any surrounding grass only once, in late summer, after seed has dropped. Cowslips and primroses cross readily where they grow together, producing the hybrid known as the false oxlip — a pleasant bonus rather than a problem.

Give them a season of patience, keep the slugs off the young leaves, and you will end up with a patch that returns every spring, spreads a little further each year, and hums quietly with insects while the rest of the garden is still waking up.