Eurybia divaricata (Aster divaricatus)

The white woodland aster, or eurybia divaricata, is a quiet beauty. It has sprays of white, starry flowers from June to October in England, from late summer through the fall in North America. 

Eurybia divaricata, photo by Tom Potterfield, Creative Commons

The leaves are heart-shaped, with a slight twist at the pointed end, as if someone had tweaked them. They also have a surprisingly spring-like fresh green to them all season long. The purple-black stems are twisty, with the flower sprays pointing this way and that. These stems are what give the plant part of its name, since divaricata means "straggly, sprawling, or spreading". The leaves and stems have also provided common names for the plant: Heartleaf Aster and Serpentine Aster.

Silene Coronaria and Geranium 'Patricia'

Rose campion and Armenian geranium make a perfect pairing. The campion, with its fuzzy silver stems makes an upright contrast to the mound of finely-cut geranium foliage spangled with dark-eyed magenta flowers. The flowers on the campion are, if anything, even more vivid than the geranium’s, almost a fluorescent pink. See them together here and here.

Geranium psilostemon, Wikipedia Commons, photo by Frank Vincentz

The two come from the same part of the world, too. Lychnis is native to southern and central Europe and central Asia, while geranium psilostemon comes from Armenia and the surrounding Caucasian territories.

Silene coronaria, Wikipedia Commons, photo by Udo Schröter 

There are those who would say that this is a eye-hurting combination. The word I would use is “showy”, and who doesn't want a bit of pizazz in the garden?

Ken Thompson says don't worry.

Ken Thompson, a British botanist and writer, says that while plant names are all being changed around because of DNA, we shouldn't let it worry us. He thinks now they have it all sorted and the names won't change again. I'm not so sure, but it's a good article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/8264847/Dont-judge-a-plant-by-appearances.html

Coreopsis

I have to confess right away that the main coreopsis I have grown is pink. This puts me in a poor position for defending the yellow daisies. The one I grew was 'Heaven's Gate', a cultivar of coreopsis rosea, and it was such a perfect colour I was willing to keep buying it year after year, since it never survived winter in Northern England.

It was only after one year when I planted some out in front achillea 'Summerwine' that I really saw what it could do - the dark raspberry eye of the coreopsis matched the achillea perfectly - and on closer inspection, I noted that the flowers on the achillea were paler at the centre, like the coreopsis in reverse. Not planned - but satisfying. Their habits were a good contrast - the achillea stands in a clump, while the coreopsis is more wispy, with thin stems and leaves but plenty of flowers. (Like coreopsis verticilliata, below.) Unfortunately, no picture, but here's the two items in question, see for yourself:

Coreopsis rosea 'Heaven's Gate'

Achillea 'Summerwine'

Gaillardia: the Saucy Flower

It might seem a bit of a stretch from Richard the Lionheart to the humble  blanket flower, but it’s not as far as you think. Gaillardia were named after a French magistrate, Gaillard de Charentonneau. Gaillard in French can mean either “strong; lively, spritely” or else ”a strapping man”. One imagines Richard himself as gaillard, but his famous castle, Chateau Gaillard, was so named because it was, in Medieval French, “saucy” since he’d built it to spite the King of France, and also because it was so stoutly built it could not be taken.

What struck me was that you could say the same  of the flowers themselves – they are certainly lively and strong, as well as being stout stalwarts of the perennial bed. Whether they’re saucy or not I’ll leave you to decide.

Gaillardia aristata by Matt Lavin; creative commons.  

Painted Daisies

In 1802 the Russian count Apollo Mussin-Pushkin set out on a scientific expedition to Georgia and Mount Ararat. He brought with him a team of experts, including the German explorer Baron Frederick Augustus Marschall von Bieberstein, who spent a long time in the region and eventually published Flora taurico-caucasica  (1808-1819). It was Bieberstein who was credited with finding the painted daisy, although it’s not named after him.  Mussin-Pushkin and Bieberstein  found some other useful plants on that trip, including achillea filipendulina, the parent of many modern varieties, and the catmint nepeta mussinii, as well as the striped squill puschkinia scilloides.

It was a pity that the daisies were not named after Bieberstein or even Mussin-Pushkin, because they keep getting shuffled around. Currently, painted daisies are in the tanacetum family, the same family as the common tansy or feverfew. Before that they were in with the pyrethrums, and they've also spent time as chrysanthemums and leucanthemums (the white daisy family). I tend to think of them as pyrethrums still, but if you want your local nursery or garden centre to know what you're looking for, ask for tanacetum coccineum. (Red tansy, in other words.)

Erigeron

Erigerons (soft "g") are a group of plants, mainly North American, that grow in sunny, open places. There are a large number of species, but I'm mainly interested in the garden perennials. Their flowers resemble those of asters, but they open at midsummer, making them long-day flowers. The dried plant was supposed to repel fleas, thus the common name, fleabane. The Latin name actually derives from Greek, eri - early, and geron - old man (as in gerontology).  This was probably suggested by the white hairs that surround the seedheads.

According to Val Bourne, erigerons were popular about 50 years ago, but they're definitely out of fashion now. She claims that people found them too much trouble, and short-lived, but I never had any problems with mine. Still, if you read down through her article, you'll notice that the introduction dates for a lot of the plants she mentions are around the 1950s, although there are some German introductions from the early 1970s.