Hi Laura, and welcome to the Winter Sowing forum! Glad to see another lurker come out of hiding, LOL.

My suggestion would be to overcome your desire for the whole bed to be matchy-matchy. Go ahead and plant the impatients on the shady side, and the petunias on the sunny side. Just pick a similar color for both, and it will look coordinated. Plants will do best if you give them what they like. I can't think of a plant that will thrive on both sides of your flower bed. If you plant sun lovers all the way across, they will get leggy on the shady half since they will be reaching for sun. On the other hand, as you mentioned, the shade lovers would fry on the sunny side. You can certainly winter sow both petunias and impatients, and since they both come in such a wide variety of colors, just pick the same shade of each.

Whatever you decide to plant, you will have fun winter sowing!

Bonnie

It would be interesting where the two meet to intermingle the two types. For instance pink petunias that flow into the pink inpatiens. Or make a sharp break between the two and put a piece of garden art there.

I've found myself backing away from "rows" of any kind.. I like the look of plants grouped in more cicular bunches of 5/7/9 plants. If you do it that way, you can easily group a couple of circles of different shade lovers and slowly move to "sunny cirles" The best thing about WSing is the AMOUNT of plant material you will have at your finger tips - - -it frees you go to try all diferent kinds of things. If you like them they get to stay, if not you pop them out and replace thme with other things in your arsenal!

Nancy

Nancy and Sweetkountry - I like your ideas!!

I had thought that bumping up impatiens and petunias next to each other in the middle of the bed would bring about an abrupt change and look kind of funny, but I guess if they are close in color range, it would look great!

I also like the idea of circles of plants! SO many choices, so few containers!

Thanks so much for helping me!