| Every garden should sport a stand of Plains Coreopsis. One of our toughest, most beautiful native plants, it celebrates summer for months and months with crowds of red and yellow blooms, each one more cheerful and bright than the one before it! You can see these flowers from across the street, and a large planting is about as close to heaven as I expect to get on this earth! Easy enough for a child to grow (and a great choice for a child's first garden -- it's foolproof!), this annual tolerates heat, drought, and gardener neglect without turning a petal! When we grew this plant in the trial gardens this past summer, people made a bee-line for it all the way from the parking lot -- past the big gaudy tropicals, past much larger and more ornate blooms. Its bold primary colors are just so bright you yearn to get a little closer. The blooms are about 2 inches across, but appear much larger. And the color division is not uniform -- some are mostly yellow, others half and half, and the majority split somewhere in between! Oh, the beauty of variation that makes every flower unique! Plains Coreopsis reaches up to 4 feet tall and about 12 to 18 inches wide, with an upright, very floriferous habit. You just won't believe how many slender flowering stems this plant sends up, each crowned in neon-bright color. The foliage is finely-cut, for an airy look that makes the blooms stand out even more. It begins blooming when the weather warms up and continues all summer -- into fall, too, if the temperature doesn't dip too sharply! Given plenty of sun and well-drained soil, there's no stopping it! Lavender makes a good companion to Plains Coreopsis -- I like quick-growing Lady and deep purple Hidcote Blue. |
