In Praise of Echinacea
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- July
- 24
I can’t imagine a more reliable perennial than purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea).
It self-seeds easily and requires practically no maintenance.
The purple-pink blooms begin to appear in July and seem to last all summer.
This garden workhorse is not the least bit fussy — no need to water them or pamper them with fancy dirt. Just give them a mostly sunny spot with well-drained soil. I’ve even got some in a corner that’s in full shade much of the day.
Coneflowers add an old-time farmhouse appeal to any garden, dressing up a perennial border or running wild through a meadow. Good combination plants include Shasta daisy, yarrow, butterfly bush and coreopsis.
I’ve now got several echinacea planted next to a big patch of orange day lilies. Pink and orange are supposed to be a garden no-no, but I like the way they look.
Deadhead the first blooms to encourage the plants to keep blooming. I leave the seed heads up in winter for the birds, especially the goldfinches.
Deer sometimes nibble at the leaves but mostly they leave mine alone.
Bees and butterflies love this plant.
I keep meaning to try all the new varieties in the full range of colors: white, yellow, rose-red and electric orange.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 2:03 pm by Bill Cary.
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Bill Cary grew up in Louisville, Ky. His gardening was limited to growing parsley and impatiens on the windowsill of Manhattan walkups until the mid-1990s when he bought a rundown old chicken farm on 8 acres in the Hudson Valley. Now he spends his weekends chasing deer, hacking away at invasive shrubs and vines and wondering why he doesn`t have more meadow and less lawn.
