Perennial of the Month-Purple coneflower

With a rainbow of colors available, my favorite coneflower is still the straight species, Echinacea purpurea. Purple coneflower is among our area’s top perennials, regardless of whether you are into natives or ornamentals. Native coneflowers tolerate the crazy mid-west weather and extremes. The flowers last for months in summer, and they’re easy and trouble-free. With its showy, pinkish-purple color, well-behaved personality, and fun seed ‘cones’ that are so attractive to wildlife, it’s a must for any garden because it works!

All those stellar attributes are what drove hybridizers to come up with more and more variations. We now have white, orange, yellow, red, fuchsia, and every shade in between. There are super short cultivars like ‘Kim’s Knee-High’ or even fragrant ones like ‘Fragrant Angel,’ a white beauty. A quick MBG or Google search will bring up over a hundred. A word of advice: RESEARCH and read your tags at the garden centers. Julie Hess did a show-stopping display at MBG with many of these new cultivars in 2023. She recommends ‘Sombrero Adobe Orange’ and ‘Cheyenne Spirit’ as better performers but warns that the hybrids just aren’t as hardy as the straight species.

Coneflower isn’t just for the garden. If you walk down the supplement aisle, you will find “Echinacea” on multiple labels. Its health benefits range from cold and flu relief to pain and inflammation relief. Native Americans used Echinacea both topically and systemically for ailments such as burns, snakebites, pain, cough, and sore throat.

But back to our native coneflower in the garden … the tried-and-true native purple coneflower will grow 2-5′ depending on soil and light. The more shade or rich soil there is, the taller and sometimes lankier it is. Blooms usually start in June and go through August, making coneflower one of the longest-blooming perennials. I prefer to leave the seed heads on through winter, not only for winter interest but for the birds that love and rely on them. Leaving the heads helps to ensure it will self-seed also. Because with all those amazing attributes, who wouldn’t want more coneflowers?

What I love about this plant;

-It’s native!

-Long-blooming, attractive flowers.

-Drought, heat, and cold hardiness.

-Beneficial to wildlife.

-Winter interest.

-Health benefits.

-Deer tolerant.

What’s not so great;

-The taller the coneflower, the more prone it is to flop. Hoops or other plants can be used for support.

-Can be prone to leaf spot or aster yellows disease. Japanese beetles can be an issue.

-I’ve had dogs that plowed their way through other plants to reach purple coneflower and eat the leaves. The plant is not toxic and no ill effects happened. Apparently, it’s common.

-Those fun, colorful cultivars are not always as hardy in St. Louis. Julie Hess recommends treating them like annuals. (Does Julie’s name sound familiar? She was featured in November 2022; A Conversation with Julie Hess, Senior Horticulturist at Missouri Botanical Garden (garden-lou.com))

Comments or questions? Email Garden-Lou at gardenloustl@gmail.com

Words and photos by Jo Batzer unless stated otherwise.