Echinacea Plants – Everything You Need To Know About Them

I know it’s a big, bold statement. To promise to tell you everything you need to know about echinacea plants (aka coneflowers). But I’m such a massive fan of these beauties that once I get started, there’s a fair chance I’ll struggle to stop! So if you want to know…

• Why you should have them
• How to grow them
• Nine echinacea plants to check out
• Some planting suggestions

Read more: Echinacea Plants – Everything You Need To Know About Them

Echinacea Plants – Why You Should have them

Great for Nature

There are so many reasons why you should grow echinacea plants. But for me the biggest reason has to be their attraction to pollinators.

Wander around any garden centre with a display of echinaceas and you will undoubtedly be joined by bees. They love buzzing happily across the large nectar and pollen rich flowers.

One look at the flowers makes it easy to understand why. The gorgeous daisy-like flowers have a large dark cone in the centre, framed by strikingly coloured petals. Hence the common name coneflower. These petals often hang down from the central cone, giving the impression that the plant is tilting its head up. This form not only makes the plant attractive to look at but it also makes the flower’s centre easy for bees to crawl over.

Birds also love their seed heads. So if you’re looking to support wildlife in your garden they’re the perfect addition to your planting scheme.

Flower Power with No Fuss

Echinacea plants are perennials. This means they will happily come back year after year. So you buy them once but get years of pleasure from them – and oh the pleasure is considerable.

Coneflowers bloom from mid summer onwards into September – adding some much needed colour once my roses have passed their first flush of loveliness. These blooms last a long time so there’s not endless deadheading to be done – although you’ll want to do some as they fade to encourage further flowering. They work well as cut flowers. So if you’re creating a cutting garden, I’d definitely add them to the mix.

All this lovely flower power comes with minimal fuss. Echinaceas are what I call a ‘no-nonsense plant.’ They’re easy to look after, they like most soils except extremely dry ones. That said, once they reach maturity I think they’re pretty drought tolerant. Mine have been one of the real performers during this incredibly dry summer.

As is all this wasn’t enough, although they provide height in the garden, they have sturdy stems so they don’t need staking. This is music to my ears as I’m always hopeless at staking plants – invariably leaving it too late as my poor old delphiniums will testify!

How to Grow Echinacea Plants

It couldn’t be easier to grow coneflowers. These gorgeous plants like well-drained soil in full sun. They’ll cope with a bit of shade, but sun is their favourite! (I do have some in semi-shade and they definitely don’t flower so well.)

They’re best planted in the spring or summer. So if someone gives you echinacea plants in late September – or you see some bargains on the sale table at a garden centre – I think I’d keep them in the pots until spring and plant them out then.

You can grow some varieties in containers to superb effect (more on that later) but the really taller ones are probably better in the middle or back of a border.

They bloom from June to September. During this period simply deadhead them as the gorgeous flowerheads fade, to encourage more to come.

Then in September leave the last flush of flowers in place. They will form fantastic seedheads which your birds will love!

I stick some mulch on them in the autumn. Ideally well rotted manure, compost if I have it or more than likely my homemade leaf mould. But if you forget to mulch them, the plants will still be fine.

Other than that I leave my echinacea plants in winter, resisting all urges to tidy them up, and simply cut them back the following spring as the new growth emerges.

That’s it – easy peasy. The one caveat I would add is that like hellebores, I don’t think echinaceas like being moved too much.

Nine Echinacea Plants To Check Out

Echinacea Purpurea

To me, the ‘little black dress of the echincea world,’ is Echinacea purpurea, also known as purple coneflower. It’s a classic which everyone should have. It has hot pink flowers and a large, orange-brown cone rising proud in the centre. It has to be on my list of favourites. However, with all the clever growers hard at work developing new varieties, there are plenty of others to choose from. Here are some others I really like…

Echinacea Vintage Red

Not really a red, but who cares! It has deep red/pink blooms made up of generous petals around a prominent deep brown cone. Grows 0.5-1 metre tall. So perfect in the middle or back of a border.

Echinacea Sunseekers Yellow

Buttery orangey yellow petals around a zingy green tinged with orange cone. Grows 60cm tall and the flowers look lovely even when they’re fading.

Echinacea Sunseeker Orange

A lovely orange echincea with hot pink around the edge of its petals and a cone that is a browny syrupy colour. Delicious! It grows 60cm tall.

Echinacea Coral

I’m always looking for ways to add coral to the garden, which is why this one has caught my eye. It has petals in shades of coral-pink surrounding a prominent, orange, central cone. It sounds like it shouldn’t work but oh, it does! Height 60 cm

Echinacea Sombrero Adobe Orange

If you’re after a hotter orange still this is the one for you. Pulsating orange petals frame a cone that’s a rich coppery ginger cake colour. It’s slightly shorter than many at 45 cm tall, so would be good vibrant addition to a smaller garden or a container.

Echinacea Delicious Candy

Fluorescent double pink/magenta flowers with a large orangey-pink cone, this is a compact new variety (60cm tall, 30cm spread) which I think this makes it particularly good for use in a large container. Delicious Candy’s flowers appear earlier than other varieties and can last up until the first frosts which is why it’s one I’ve added to my garden.

Echinacea White Swan

Like Echinacea Purpurea, White Swan (60cm tall) is another classic. It has pristine white petals hanging down from a coppery brown, spikey cone. Making it, I think, more elegant than your typical echinacea.

Echinacea Sunseekers Apple Green

Whilst lots of echincea plants are hot, vibrant colours, you can also find varieties of this daisy-like stunner in cooler colours. One of my favourites is Apple Green. Its limey-green flaring petals are white at the base. They surround a greeny-orange cone. I think it would look particularly good planted near Mexican Feathergrass which has similar limey-green tones, or the lovely lime green kniphofia called pineapple.

Echinacea White Meditation

If you want a taller, fuller looking white echinacea, White Meditation is for you, at 60cm-80cm tall.

Echinacea Mooodz Motivation

Salmon pink petals fading to peach plus a hot orange cone tinged with green and pink, I think this echinacea is absolutely stunning. No wonder its name has an ooo right in the middle of it!

Planting Suggestions

One of the beauties of echinaceas or coneflowers is their versatility.

Drifts

You can of course plant them in a solid drift and they will look lovely.

Or you can plant combinations of echinaceas together.

But you can do so much more than this.

Prarie Planting

They look superb in prarie planting schemes, which is such a rage these days. For instance you could plant them with veronicastrum, agastache, grasses, helenium, rudbeckia, achillea and eryngium or as above among a sea of echinops.

Grasses

They also look just incredible with grasses.

Cottage Borders

I think echinacea plants are the perfect middle or back of border addition to a cottage garden border. I have Echinacea Purpurea planted in my sunny border above alongside gypsophila.

Containers

I’m a container enthusiast as you know, and think echinacea plants are a perfect addition to pots.

This combination of Mooodz Motivation in a simple terracotta pot is brilliant.

But while you can have them in containers on their own, I prefer to mix them up with grasses and other perennials. For instance I have Echinacea Delicious Candy planted with Pennisetum Shogun and Salvia Love and Wishes combined in a pot.

I think the combination works well in the red corner of my patio (see below).

I also like the use of this new Achillea called Vintage white, with Echinaea Sunseekers Yellow which I spotted at a garden centre below.

Or how about this taller grouping below. It looks like Miscanthus Flamingo, a white astrantia, and a hot pink echinacea.

If you love prarie planting but only have a small patio, you can create one in a pot – I love this pot created using echinaceas, achilleas and crocosmia.

Or who said pale pink, purple, orange and hot pink won’t work! I think this combination of achillea, agastache, Red Hot Poker below all combined with Echinacea purpurea looks stunning.

In fact – tear up the colour rule book and have fun. As long as you like the combo, who cares what anyone else thinks!

So if that lot doesn’t whet your appetite to go out and get an echinacea or two for your garden I don’t know what will.

If you do you won’t regret it and the bees and birds will thank you for years to come. Surely that has to be the secret to happy gardening – x