ANYBODY IN THE MOOD for something just plain pretty at the moment? Something to search the seed catalogs for, choosing among the many wildly colorful varieties, and then get ready to sow something hopeful and bright? Well me, too.
So after I saw a photo of a bed of snapdragons the other day from last year’s garden of Joseph Tychonievich, I thought they might be just the thing to bring us all some delight. Joseph Tychonievich is here to entice us further and tell us how to grow them, and which ones to look for especially.
Joseph is a writer, a plant breeder, and of course a gardener and the creator of Josephgardens.com and a Substack newsletter by the same name. It was in his latest Substack post that I saw a photo of his lavish display of snapdragons from last year’s garden (above) and called him up to ask for more information. Joseph Gardens in South Bend, Ind.
Read along as you listen to the Jan. 27, 2025 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
snapdragons galore, with joseph tychonievich
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Margaret Roach: Hi, Joseph. How are you? Brrr, huh?
Joseph Tychonievich: Yeah, I’m doing good. We’re finally warming up and I’m doing good.
Margaret: [Laughter.] Yeah, right, right. Warming up into the teens, right?
Joseph: [Laughter.] Right. Warm for Northern Indiana. Yeah.
Margaret: So I mentioned in the introduction that I called you up and pestered you after seeing your recent Substack. But the title of the latest post there was “Gardening and the One-Body Problem: Confronting the Reality that I Can’t Do It All” [laughter] and it had a photo of a bed of snapdragons. But I just have to ask you before we get onto those, the one-body problem, I think I might have it, too.
Joseph: Well, I mean I haven’t read “The Three-Body Problem,” which is a science-fiction book, and I guess it was a movie or something now. But the concept is realizing that the garden that I dreamed of when I was a teenager, and the gardens I’d been inspired by as a teenager, were often made by rich people who had a team of gardeners to do the work for them [laughter].
Margaret: How convenient.
Joseph: Yes. And sort of this idea, oh, I want to have 20 acres in the country with double herbaceous borders and everything and an orchard, and it’s like, oh, well, I don’t have a staff of five people to do all the work. I need to think about what I as one person, who also has to pay the bills and take care of my cats [laughter] and all those other things, what’s really a garden that I can take care of and enjoy rather than getting caught up in imagining this overwhelming amount of work that I simply can’t do as one person.
Margaret: Well, it made me laugh, and I thought it was a good kind of reminder for all of us, sort of thinking about the year ahead is not to limit dreams in a negative use of the word limit, but to be realistic, and it’ll be much more joyful.
Joseph: Yeah. So I feel like I don’t want my garden to become a chore or something I need to do, or a weight, it should be something fun and relaxing and pleasurable. And some of that is being realistic about how much time you have to give to it.
Margaret: So yeah, snapdragons: There was a picture in that Substack post and they were blooming mightily, these gorgeous snapdragons [top of page photo and below], in the so-called what a lot of people call “the hell strip,” the area between the sidewalk and the curb in front of your house where usually it’s just grass or whatever, or a street tree and grass. And it was like, whoa, snapdragons there? Wow [laughter].
Joseph: Yeah. So we moved in and we have very sandy soil here, so it’s a very, very dry lean soil and that strip, they were trying to grow a long grass and a little strip between the sidewalk and the road, which you would have to irrigate constantly. So I was like, I’m not doing that. Let’s figure out options for it.
And snapdragons are, I mean, we think of them as a summer annual and grow them as summer annuals, but wild snapdragons are from Spain and they are really from a pretty dry climate. So unlike a lot of annuals that are really thirsty and if they get dry, they just wilt, snapdragons actually do really well in sort of leaner, dry conditions. So they’re actually well0suited to that particular spot because it’s very public, lots of people walking by, I want a big shot of color there, but I don’t want to be out irrigating the sidewalk all the time. So they do really well in there without really any supplemental irrigation or anything, and give me that big pow of color out where I really, really wanted.
Margaret: So there were a lot of them in this picture. This was a stretch again of them. And so of course my head started thinking, oh, go to the garden center… And I started immediately lamenting the days of when six-packs annuals [laughter]… You’re already laughing, you know what I’m going to say: Annuals came in six-packs and it was a few dollars, and you got six little baby plants that had been sown from seed, and you could get, you say, “I’m going to get 10 of those six-packs and I’m going to put 60 of them out by the curb or whatever,” and it wasn’t that big. Now it’s like, oh, there’s $200 or whatever [laughter], because they come in onesies a lot of times in a 3- or whatever inch pot. It’s changed, the whole world of annuals.
And I think by the way, in their native southwestern Europe, like you said in Spain and so forth, I think they may be short-lived perennials or perennials or something.
Joseph: Yeah, they are short-lived perennials that Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, and some of them actually, there are some species you can grow as perennials here, and even if you have dry conditions and deep snow cover, which we do here, even the standard “annual snapdragons” will overwinter sometimes, even in a Zone 6 winter, if you have nice deep snow.
Margaret: Yeah, wacky. So especially the other thing that I loved about your post, besides the headline of the Substack post “Gardening and the One-Body Problem” and the picture of this gorgeous display out in the hell strip, was the idea that, ooh, if I did that from seed—I know Joseph grows everything from the seed—this could be a lot of bang for the price of a packet of seeds, right?
Joseph: Yes. You know me, I’m a seed nut. I love growing stuff from seed, and so much of that is because I don’t have a lot of disposable income [laughter]. And so seed is so affordable if you know the techniques to do it, and especially if you want to do a big mass planting, because a packet of snap garden seeds, you’re going to get literally hundreds of seeds in that packet. So you can pretty much sow out as many as you have the space to grow on and do those sort of big over the top displays. But like you said, if you go and buy 4-inch pots at the nursery now, that will cost such a fortune. And the other piece, like saving money, is also it’s really hard to find tall snapdragons for sale at nurseries now. The big box stores and stuff just don’t carry those old-fashioned, taller, really good snapdragons. So it’s hard to even buy them if you even want it to.
Margaret: So is it Antirrhinum, is that right? Antirrhinum majus?
Joseph: Yes.
Margaret: Yes. And usually I think that’s one of the species, and they’ve been hybridized, but that’s often a big part of the genetics of even the hybrids. Yes. And so you said that a lot of the ones now are shorter. That’s what they’re churning out en masse?
Joseph: Yeah, I mean it’s this whole thing. This is so weird, certainly the big box stores are not growing anything there. Everything is being shipped in on a semi in bloom, and even a lot of independent garden centers now aren’t growing stuff on site. And when a plant is twice as tall, it takes up twice as much space in the shipping racks and it becomes really expensive. So there’s this huge trend to everything that has to be short and compact. And snapdragons particularly, the stems are a little bit brittle. You don’t notice that in the garden, but in shipping they break. So they’re one of these things that’s like, it’s not practical for the modern sort of supply chain of mass-market horticulture to grow tall snapdragons. So they’ve bred these really short ones, which are cute, too, and they have their place, but they don’t have this impact of the tall ones.
Margaret: So when do these bloom? When do I sow them? What season of the year is this that I’m going to get the show, and how far back do I back up to get going?
Joseph: That depends a little bit on where you are. So if you’re in the Southeast about Zone 8, you want to sow them in the fall as a winter annual you would your pansies, because they don’t really, they’re not very heat-tolerant. So for people in hot climates, they’re good planted in the fall and let overwinter, and they’ll give you a big display in the spring.
I’m going to sow mine probably, well, some of them self-seed and some of mine overwinter, but I’ll be sowing some. My last frost is in May, and I’ll sow them about two months before that to get ready to plant them out. And then if you do live area with a relatively cool climate, they’ll keep blooming right through the summer, especially if you deadhead them or cut them. So they’ll sort of just get better and better and better as you go through the summer.
Margaret: O.K. Do you pinch them before you put them out or anything? Or do you put them out and you let them kind of grow?
Joseph: Yeah, I do not pinch them. I do deadhead them, unless I’m growing the double varieties, which you don’t have to deadhead, which we can talk about, because they won’t start seed naturally. But if you deadhead, so cut them off as the flowers fade, you’ll get a lot more bloom. They’ll bloom a lot better if they are not let to go to seed.
I always do, though, let my favorite ones set seed. So that picture I showed you, I first planted those the first summer we lived here, which was like three years ago. So those, some of mine are my own hybrids. I do all kinds of crazy stuff [laughter]. They’re a little hardier than the typical ones, but a lot of them have self-sowed. So if you don’t have a particularly deep mulch and let some of them go to seed often they’ll self-sow and just keep coming back year after year. So mine are now sort of self-sustaining in that spot, which is nice.
Margaret: That’s amazing in Indiana. Cool.
Joseph: Yeah.
Margaret: O.K. So you back up about eight weeks or so from a set-out date that’s right after the frost date, is that what you’re doing?
Joseph: Yeah. Or a couple of weeks before; they can take a light frost. They’re fairly cold-tolerant. Yeah. Particularly this is where I’m not a good seed starter, because I’m not precise on timing [laughter]. And I think around the beginning of May, I’ll plant them out. And it more depends on when I have time and when I got them sowed. But they’re kind of flexible, because if you plant them out a little bit later, they’ll catch up. If you get them ahead early, they can take some frost; you can plant them out early. So they’re a little more flexible than something like a tomato, where I feel like if I plant it and it freezes, they’re dead, and if I wait too late, then they’re not going to ripen before frost in my short season. The snapdragons do well in the cooler temperatures, so they’ll bloom into the fall even after the first frost, and I can plant them out a little before the frost and be a little bit looser with them on the timing.
Margaret: And are they fine seeds or big seeds, or what am I going to get in that packet? You said it could be a lot of seeds.
Joseph: Little teeny, tiny seeds, poppy-seed size, which is-
Margaret: So cell packs, flats, what am I doing? Community pots, what am I going to do?
Joseph: I love community pots,
Margaret: So that’s a lot of seed in one 4-inch pot?
Joseph: A lot of seed in one pot. So actually I’m doing, this is my go-to method for teeny seeds right now, which is kind of bizarre [laughter]. I’m using a very hig- tech system using those disposable aluminum casserole trays you can find at the grocery store, they’re like aluminum pans that you would take a lasagna to a potluck with, and they come with a plastic clear plastic lid that snaps over the top to protect them, if you’re taking them somewhere.
Margaret: Like a dome.
Joseph: Yeah. And they’re super-cheap, I can always run out and grab them, and I put just vermiculite in that, moisten it. I can poke some holes for drainage and put that lid on, and then that keeps it perfectly moist and humid, which is really important with these teeny seeds. If the soil surface dries out, they’re dead. There’s this fragile moment when they’re really small, so that I use a lot for my small seeds and it’s super-easy and it works really effectively so I don’t have to be so on top of watering all the time.
Margaret: It’s like a little germination chamber.
Joseph: Yes.
Margaret: And so are you sowing them on top of the vermiculite, or are you covering them, or was there any depth thing or it doesn’t matter?
Joseph: I’m sowing them right on the soil surface, and snapdragon seeds are one of those seeds that needs light to germinate, which is like a rule of thumb:Teeny tiny seeds often do. If they’re buried too deep and they’re dark, they will not germinate. So you want to sow them right on the soil surface, which is also why it’s important to do some kind of cover to keep the humidity high, because there’s no soil on top of them to keep that soil moist. So something over the top of the pot; even if it’s a pot you can put just a plastic wrap or something over a single pot just to keep that moist while they’re up and germinating. And once they germinate, they’ll send down roots and be a little more resilient. But there’s this little fragile moment when they’re first coming out of those seeds.
Margaret: So at the most, I might dust a little more vermiculite on top or something, but not bury them.
Joseph: Yeah, don’t bury. Yeah, you could just do a light sprinkling over the top, but I just sprinkle them right over the surface and don’t cover them at all.
Margaret: And so then they come up in this miniature lasagna pan [laughter], and then do, as we used to say, in the more greenhouse world of English gardens, do you prick them out and pot them on, or what do you do? Do you leave them and just transplant them from there into the garden, or do you put pot them up into individual containers first to let them get some size, or what?
Joseph: Yeah, I then pop them up into individual containers, and I do that pretty early, almost as soon as the cotyledons, the first seed leaves, have expanded before they even put out their first true leaf.
Margaret: Oh, O.K.
Joseph: So I do it really small and one of the reasons I like sowing in vermiculite is because it’s so lightweight, it’s very easy to pull them out and keep the whole root system intact. So you can just literally grab the cotyledons and just lift them out and they’ll pull easily up out of the soil with all the roots. And so then I plant them out into their individual pots.
I like that method because it’s easier to keep that one tray moist. Once I have individual pots, it’s a big area to keep moist while they’re germinating. And then I also don’t end up with empty pots in my flat, because I can carefully put one seedling in each one. And especially if you’re buying some of these… I mean, snapdragons are typically a pretty cheap seed, but other seeds are sometimes kind of expensive, and you don’t get a lot of seeds for your money, and I want to make sure that every seedling grows so I can then pot each seedling that germinates into its own pot and not have any empty pots.
Margaret: Okay. So you’re saying eight or so weeks probably. And that includes the time in the vermiculite little cocoon [laughter] and then the potted-on vessel before planting out, before being transplanted into the garden.
And you’re not pinching or anything, but is there anything else? You said, and you said that they were in this lean soil out by the curb in your particular case. I mean, obviously they don’t have to be in that kind of a situation. They could take it a little different.
Joseph: They can grow in pretty rich soils and they’ll be happy in that. Yeah, I’m not really very… I guess the only other thing is I’m growing them under lights indoors while it’s below freezing, but I try to start carrying them outside into the sun almost as soon as I can. So even if we have a little warm spell early on, I like to move them outside, because it helps harden them off and get them used to the ultraviolet light and the more intense sunlight outside. And because they do grow well in cooler temperatures, as you know, in the spring, it’s like we have a week of cold and a week of warm, and those weeks of warm, I’ll move the whole flats outside into the sunny area to let them grow outside as much as I can and only bring them back inside is when it’s turning cold again.
Margaret: It’s so interesting because I put everything on almost like trays that you would bring if you were serving food, like bringing to the dinner table or to put on a TV tray or something. I put all my flats and pots and six-packs, I put them on trays like that, my flats, because I carry them in and out. I do exactly what you just said. If the day is 40 degrees or something, I bring the stuff out. I don’t put it right out in the full sun the first minute, I put in a protected spot, so that by the time mine are ready or age-wise or whatever, they’re also hardened off already. They’ve been coming in and out.
Joseph: Yeah, yeah.
Margaret: Oh, interesting. Oh, I didn’t know you did that, too. [Laughter.] That was the only crazy person.
Joseph: Yeah, so I found especially when you’re growing under lights, the lights don’t produce any ultraviolet light at all, which is the main thing that causes the leaves to burn. And there are some compounds the leaves can develop once they’re exposed to ultraviolet light to protect them, but some of it is in the structure of the leaf as it grows. So some of those older leaves that developed under the lights will never really develop that full ability to resist full bright sunlight. So I want to get them at least a little shot of actual direct sunlight as early in the growing process as possible, so that they start growing those leaves that are morphologically able to handle the sunlight without burning.
Margaret: So some of the funny things I was reading about them after we talked on the phone the other day: They’re called snapdragons, but they used to be called calves’ snouts and lion’s mouths. They had all these crazy names. And they’re related to foxgloves and to turtleheads to other things that sort of have roughly a shape that kind of shape of flower, right? And bees love to get into flowers like that. And I think often hummingbirds may be interested in flowers of those shapes. It probably depends on the color, I don’t know.
Do you have varieties that, I mean… I know you’ve been hybridizing and so forth, but for those of us getting started, variety sources, any directions that way of things to guide us? I mean, I was of course already thumbing through the catalogs [laughter].
Joseph: Yeah, I mean, I have some favorite varieties. One thing I want to say about talking about the shape of the flower, one thing that’s interesting, is that smaller bees can’t get into them, so they have to physically pull the flower open. And honeybees are not big enough to get into a snapdragon flower. So interestingly, honeybees, which are not native in North America, we’ll completely ignore snapdragons, but our native bumblebees and the carpenter bees that are big and strong enough to pull those flowers open, love them. So actually, even though they’re not native here, they are a good food source for our native bees because they don’t have to compete with honeybees to try to access them.
But favorite varieties, there’s one, a couple that I really love. One that I like is an old variety. I’m not sure how old, but ‘Black Prince’ is [above, from Select Seeds]. It’s a deep red that does almost veer into black. It’s a beautiful dark, deep red flower. And then the foliage itself has a deep reddish color to it as well, which is really, really pretty.
Margaret: That is so funny you say that because of course, what do I have written down here? Something from Select Seeds catalog called ‘Black Prince,’ which is exactly what you just described. That’s exactly what attracted my eye was like, whoa, this is really dramatic.
Joseph: Yeah, it’s really dramatic. It’s really, really cool. There was another variety a while ago that had dark foliage, too, with different flower colors, but it was not vigorous at all. But this one, and I think this is an old heirloom variety that probably then does go by a few different names, but the foliage is really, really beautiful and it’s a really vigorous and looks great, that really intense color.
Margaret: Any other goodies?
Joseph: Another one I love is ‘Night and Day.’ And again, there’s similar varieties. That one, the tube of the flower is white and then I don’t know, do we call them the lips, is this intense red. And the contrast is really pretty dramatic because it’s like a dark red and white and they give you this really incredible bicolor look to the flower.
Margaret: And I mean, I could do these in pots or a window box or I mean lots of different ways, right? I mean, it’s not like I have to put them in the ground.
Joseph: No. And there’s a huge range in heights, and that’s something you can look, so if you look at like Select Seeds and Johnny’s Selected Seeds… Johnny’s mostly will have some of the really tall ones, because they really cater to the cut-flower market. So you can get these ones that are like 3 feet tall, which are really beautiful. Some of the really big ones do need staking—great cut flowers and really dramatic, which are probably better in the ground. And then go down to smaller ones that still have those nice spikes, but have more like 12 inches, 18 inches, which are probably better for a container growing just from the scale of them.
Margaret: Wow. And there’s such a color range, and as you said, there’s bi colors. There’s ones that are sort of mottled in colors, edged in different color. I mean, it is pretty much something for everyone.
Joseph: The other interesting ones to look for are the double-flowered ones. So the [Madame] Butterfly series and Twinny series are both double-flowered ones which have extra layers of petals, which if you love the snapping of the flowers, if you love that classic shape, they don’t have that because it’s kind of an open form. But what’s interesting is the double forms will not set seed unless they’re hand-pollinated, so you don’t have to deadhead them to get the bloom as much. So if you hate deadheading, looking for either Butterfly or Twinny or some of the other double-flowered ones, they usually won’t set seed themselves. And so you can get that good repeat bloom without sort of the dead heading that goes along with it. [Above, from Swallowtail Gardens catalog, the peach version from of the Twinny series.]
Margaret: They don’t have any fragrance. Is there a new fragrance?
Joseph: They do, and I don’t know I should have. So there’s a different species, Antirrhinum siculum, which is one of the wild species that has… it smells, it’s like a honey scent; it’s a really, really wonderful scent. And occasionally you’ll smell them in the modern hybrids. But as with everything, look in a lot of flowers, fragrance, and how long the flowers last in a vase are inversely related. So very fragrant flowers tend to fade quickly.
Margaret: Oh, interesting.
Joseph: And scentless ones will last a lot longer. And because snapdragons have been bred for a long time for the florist trade, a lot of the fragrance has been bred out of them, because the fragrant ones don’t last well in a vase. So sometimes in heirloom, like really old-fashioned snapdragon varieties, you can get some of that scent or some of the other species, but it’s kind of hit and miss. And a lot of those sort of modern hybrids have any fragrance.
Margaret: Any other annuals, if I’m shopping around—and again, I could use a burst of color [laughter] and delight in this mad, mad world we’re in at the moment—anything else that is sown this way that you use your little lasagna foil pans with the domes and the vermiculite? I mean, is there anything else that I do this way?
Joseph: Yeah, so I use pretty much the exact same method for my pansies that I start in the fall or earlier spring; petunias are basically very similar size seed and germination. And petunias, I feel like we think petunia seems so boring, but you can get into these old-fashioned petunias. Some have huge flowers and fragrances. There’s a lot of, again, diversity that’s lost in sort of the mass-market horticulture. Really pretty much most of your annual seeds, you can start this way.
And then I just use a rule of thumb of if it’s a teeny seed, I sow it on the soil surface. And if it’s bigger, I try to cover it with a depth equal to the size of the seed as a sort of rule of thumb. But yeah, pretty much, especially if you’re looking, I mean we both love Select Seeds is a great catalog. Some of these off-the-beaten-path annuals, this sort of basic method will work with a lot of different things for your garden.
Margaret: Well Joseph, I’m so glad to reconnect, and I’m so glad that you did that recent Substack post that really grabbed me because I thought I had the one-body problem. So thank you, and I hope we’re going to be in touch regularly. I want to see what other crazy things you’re going to do besides planting snapdragons in your hell strip and so forth. I can’t wait.
Joseph: Well, I would love that. It was so good talking with you.
(Photos from Joseph Tychonievich except as noted.)
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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 15th year in March 2024. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Jan. 27, 2025 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
