I have grown several kinds of clarkia/godetia, but not lately---maybe most recently 3-5 years ago. They are beautiful, but in our hot climate they are short bloomers. They don't care much for high humidity and don't like our summer heat, so here they pretty much are spring bloomers that burn up when the summer heat arrives in June. Ignore seed catalog descriptions that say they are summer bloomers. They probably are summer bloomers in cool summer climates, but not here. They're easy from seed. I like them because they were one of my grandmother's favorite flowers. She grew godetia for spring blooms and cosmos and zinnias for summer blooms.

Thank you so much for sharing your wealth of knowledge and experience! Is there anything you haven't grown? Would they do okay in part shade? I can't tell by the picture if the leaves are of interest. I do grow some things for their leaves.

I grew cosmos a couple years in a row a few years back. I love them. I know they can re-seed, but nothing last year. However, they are springing up everywhere this year! Gotta love free plants!

I grew them in morning sun and afternoon shade. They did fine there and bloomed fine. My grandmother grew them in Texas in full sun on the south side of her house and they did fine there until it got hot, but by then she had zinnias and cosmos coming up in the same beds to replace them, so it always worked out. One of my favorite memories of her is of us sitting on her front porch with her when we were teenagers, my cousin and I, and asking her about her favorite flowers, and the ones I remember her listing that day were godetia, verbascum, cosmos and zinnias. I can still hear her exact tone of voice that day in my head, so sweet and gentle and happy to share her love of flowers with us. It is one of my best memories of her, and I suppose she was in her 70s then. She lived to be 92, so we had a chance to have lots more conversations with her about flowers after that, but that is the day that is stuck in my mind. I've grown them al herel....and a million more....in a quest to find what does best in my soil and in our heat. I think the only way to learn what grows best for you in your soil, your microclimate, your weather, etc. is to try everything and see what works best. I've been surprised at how well some things---like balsam---do here. They actually do better for me here than they did in Fort Worth. I don't know why. For our first 8 or 10 years here, I grew every kind of flower I could find either from seed or transplants. I wanted to find my own best options while I was still young enough to enjoy growing them. I still look for new things to add (cuphea is one of my more recent successes from seed) but also grow more perennials and reseeding annuals now, so there's not nearly enough space available for experimentation.

I do love free plants. Anything that reseeds here is a valuable treasure in my eyes. Not everything reseeds every year, as some years the rain might wash away the seeds or whatever, but I find it fun each year to see what does come back.

Dawn beat me to it. I've grown them. But she is right, they don't like our heat.