Do you buy summer flowers to plant or pre-planted baskets?

I am cheap, so I have wild flowers planted. But I think this year, I am going to do better.

We have a lot of rose bushes, we replant the zinnia seeds we save every year, then the irises and peonies come back every year by themselves, I got my mother some potted dianthus flowers a couple years back.

Super...all those plant names sound so cool! I am totally uneducated about flowers. I have no clue about any of it. But this year, I am going to try to take it up a notch and get a better looking landscape.

For the most part I HATE irises because we mainly only have white, purple and yellow, and every other year they multiply and we're running out of places to put the new ones:



Peonies are easier because they don't require much work and they don't branch out:



and then this is the dianthus:



supposed to attract butterflies and hummingbirds, I don't know if it works, but it looks nice.

Awesome looking pics. I want that kind of cool at my house!

I tend to buy them. Haven't quite mastered the fine art of gardening just yet. lol

I'm in an apartment that faces north, so I don't get a lot of sunlight. Begonias are one of the few plants that work for here I live. I buy them already potted and plant them. I'll do tulips and daffodils in the fall, too, but I haven't had much success with other plants because of how little direct sunlight I get.

Neither. But I'm prone to buy the pre-planted stuff.

I've never been able to start them myself. If it ever stops being so cold I'm going to buy plants & flowers already started once I take the rest of that tree down.