Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Grow the littlest ones in pots. Zinnias come in many sizes, and some of them are gigantic! But I absolutely adore annual vincas, which are available in pink, purple and white. They deal with dry conditions really well and have little or no pest problems. I leave mine at the end of the season, and in spring, I have hundreds of baby plants coming up where last year's vincas were. I think they're pretty underrated. When I had shade at our last house, I grew a lot of impatienz for masses of color, but our current home has no shade at all. So I started planting vincas, and they're a great alternative.
The back part of my patio gets no sun, so I am going to put some impatients in there. The vincas look pretty too.