Meet the Queen of the coneflowers
Echinaceas are real beepleasers and ideal for growing among grasses. Val Bourne picks her favourites for the garden
Echinaceas are real bee pleasers, ideal for growing among grasses
Echinacea is a North American prairie plant that comes to the fore in the second half of summer – literally looking as fresh as a daisy when gardens can be a little weary. They’re often known as purple cone flowers because most have a distinctly humped middle of tiny flowers surrounded by showy ray petals. They’re insect-friendly, so hardly ever without a bee or butterfly, and the golden centre helps them mix with lots of different colours without clashing. They make a real contribution to a border and when planted en masse, resemble a series of spinning plates: their stiff stems keep the flamboyant, flat-topped flowers very erect. Consequently, echinaceas are a mainstay of naturalistic prairie planting schemes consisting of later-f lowering perennials and late-season grasses. They fade into winter gracefully and form a strong seedhead. However, they do self-seed, so you may wish to clip off the heads. Echinaceas are also useful in traditional borders, planted with duskyleaved hylotelephium ‘Purple Emperor’, dark phloxes such as ‘The King’ and purple dahlias including ‘Thomas A. Edison’.
Native habitat
The most commonly grown is Echinacea purpurea and there are white and pink forms. In its native habitat it grows in prairies and open woodland on loamy, or sandy, well-drained soil. As a result, even though they’re very hardy, echinaceas don’t like having wet roots, so many gardeners have problems keeping them over winter. Our climate tends to produce stop-start winters and echinaceas can begin to shoot precociously in warmer spells before cold weather slows them down again. In their native land, they get a cold winter followed by a short, extremely warm spring and a hot summer. The other problem is that most gardeners buy echinaceas in flower, which means they don’t have enough time to put down deep roots before winter arrives. A good solution is to raise your own Echinacea purpurea plants from March-sown seeds, then bed out the young plants in late August. Once established, echinaceas are very drought tolerant thanks to their deep taproots. Gardeners at Great Dixter use ‘Rubinstern’ (which translates as ‘Ruby Star’, left) in their borders, which is available as seed; plants are also commonly stocked by nurseries. There are double seed strains including ‘Double Decker’, which has one flower atop another. Some of my plants turned out to be weird misfits though, rather than the neat affairs shown on the seed packet. The bright-pink pompoms of ‘Razzmatazz’, raised in Holland by Marco Van Noort, are a better bet and this echinacea overwinters well but can’t be raised from seed. Hybrid echinaceas come in tempting colours, not just pink and white. There’s a jade one called ‘Green Jewel’, a warmorange one called ‘Tiki Torch’ and a hot-red one aptly called ‘Hot Papaya’. North American plant breeders have hybridised E. purpurea with E. paradoxa to produce orange and red flowers too. The first peachy-coloured hybrid, ‘Art’s Pride’ (2004), caused a sensation but didn’t survive British winters. Similarly, Richard Saul, based near Atlanta in Georgia, has bred a fabulous Big Sky Series but these complex sterile hybrids often have poor root systems, which doesn’t help longevity. The best advice, if you buy a showy hybrid, is to grow your summer purchase in a large pot and overwinter it somewhere dry, before planting it out in the following spring.