For the past four years I've grown almost every kind of vegetable I thought I'd like to eat, multiple varieties of each. Somehow this rampant experimentation has not extended to flowers. Part of this is having had incredible enjoyment from the easy standbys of cosmos and zinnias that have brought hordes of bees and other insects that help look after the garden.

Sometimes I think easy success can lead to a kind of stagnation. I've been planting a lot of California native wildflowers with my home vegetable crops, and one packet of seeds I could never seem to plant was my California coreopsis (Coreopsis californica).

California coreopsis is a North American species of tickseed. In the wild it's found in dry areas throughout California and northwestern Mexico. Tickseeds come in perennial varieties that can survive cold winters down to USDA Zone 4. Our climate in Vacaville is 9b, which means that most perennial tickseeds should do fine.

If this were a perennial tickseed, space is tight. As gardeners, we want all the plants and also, in the very same moment, have no idea where we'll put them. Annuals are different.

I have always planted cosmos and zinnias because they're nice to have and because they only last the year. Melons need bees, and annual flowers bring them. This is why borage (Borago officinalis), that sprawling mess of a plant, will always have a place, volunteers and all—the bees can't get enough of it, and the blue flowers taste like bursts of cucumber.

Last year I bought another packet of coreopsis and started them in two pots. When the first leaves came I thought, all right, these look harmless enough. A month later I planted them in my flower beds with the volunteer cosmos and zinnias already growing on their own.

When the first yellow flowers opened I was surprised by how deep yellow they were. I realized they were the first truly yellow ornamental flowers I'd ever planted. Yellow isn't really in my palette. Pink, purple, white, white especially, these are the kinds of colors that make sense to me. Then I saw those bursts of yellow coreopsis and they seemed fine.

The coreopsis, reputedly an annual, survived through the winter and is back in bloom. The snapdragons behind it succumbed to rust in the spring but the coreopsis is thriving. The rampant seeds spread in last year's flush, which I didn't bother to deadhead as I probably should have, haven't produced any volunteers to clean up.

On the other hand, seeds from last year's butter lupine (Lupinus luteolus) have been sprouting through the woodchip mulch on the walkways. But I left them, because a little wildness can be good and because the native bees of all kinds love those flowers as much as anything.