Cannas, a Good Accent Plant in the Garden
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- December
- 15
One or two cannas as accent plants can make a perennial border pop. I find that to be true for most tropical plants. You don’t want to see a sea of banana trees or pineapple lilies in a Hudson Valley garden. Just one, or maybe two, is fun because it’s so unexpected.
Here, a canna with Queen Anne’s lace and butterfly bush.
Cannas add drama and height and a different sort of structure.
Look at how their veiny leaves catch the light.
Cannas, which are not hardy in the Northeast, need to be dug up and stored indoors for winter. I like to wait until a fairly hard frost kills the foliage.
Then you can pull them easily, usually with your bare hands.
Then cut back the stem to what would have been ground level, so that you’re left with just the roots and bulbs. My cannas multiply over the course of the summer, leaving me lots more for the following year.
You can tease everything apart with your fingers.
I lay them out on newspapers to let them dry out for a few days, then drop them into a cardboard box for storage in my unheated basement.
Just make sure your storage spot stays above freezing.
Here’s a post from a couple of years ago with lots more on cannas, including more specifics on how to overwinter them.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 4:13 pm by Bill Cary.
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Category: cannas, overwintering plants, tropicals
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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.
