How to Plant and Grow Baby’s Breath

With its loose, billowy panicles of tiny single or double pink or white flowers, baby’s breath provides a lightness and airiness to flower gardens. The creeping forms drape beautifully over rock walls. After bloom time, shear the plants to deadhead and for neatness. Plants prefer sweet (alkaline) soils with full sun and excellent drainage.

Varieties of Baby’s Breath

Baby’s Breath

Gypsophila paniculata produces clouds of small single or double white or pink flowers on branching stems. Its blue-green leaves are 2-3 inches long. Superior cultivars are often grafted. Plant in zones 5-9.

Creeping Baby’s Breath

Gypsophila repens seldom grows more than a few inches high and is ideal as a groundcover or for tumbling over rocks and walls. The pink or white flowers are abundant for many weeks in summer. Plant in zones 4-7.

Baby’s Breath Companion Plants

Oriental Poppy

Poppies’ papery, almost artificial-looking flowers are well-loved, and there are a surprising number of different kinds. The finer species including Iceland, Alpine, and Atlantic poppies have a special charm with flowers in myriad colors in spring. Oriental poppies are bristly and less refined, but they have huge, exploding flowers of brilliant reds, pinks, white, oranges, and plum, some with double flowers in summer. Most are blotched with black at the base and centered with a boss of black stamens. After these plants give their all at bloom time, the foliage dies back and looks ragged, so plan to fill the newly available space with annuals, dahlias, baby’s breath, or other later-blooming plants.

Daylily

Daylilies are so easy to grow you’ll often find them growing in ditches and fields, escapees from gardens. And yet they look so delicate, producing glorious trumpet-shape blooms in myriad colors. In fact, there are some 50,000 named hybrid cultivars in a range of flower sizes (the minis are very popular), forms, and plant heights. Some are fragrant.The flowers are borne on leafless stems. Although each bloom lasts but a single day, superior cultivars carry numerous buds on each scape so bloom time is long, especially if you deadhead daily. The strappy foliage may be evergreen or deciduous.

Firewitch Cheddar Pink

The quintessential cottage flower, pinks are treasured for their grasslike blue-green foliage and abundant starry flowers, which are often spicily fragrant. Depending on the type of pink, flowers appear in spring or summer and tend to be pink, red, white, rose, or lavender, but come in nearly all shades except true blue. Plants range from tiny creeping groundcovers to 30-inch-tall cut flowers, which are a favorite with florists. Foliage is blue-green.