Amazing Agastache
Posted in Gardening Tips on September 6 2011, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
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Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education. |
An indispensable addition to any late summer garden is the hummingbird mints (Agastache). They are magnets for butterflies and hummingbirds and generally flower from July well into October.
They are heat tolerant candidates for your garden that thrive in xeric gardens with low fertility. They are in the mint family but are the well-behaved cousin that doesn’t run all over the place. With their fragrant foliage, they are deer and rabbit resistant.
We have several cultivars of Agastache in our Trial Bed Garden in the Home Gardening Center. At the end of the Trial Bed we have a tall upright cultivar called Agastache ‘Heatwave’. It reaches between 3-4 feet tall and has deliciously fragrant blue green foliage. It is covered at this time of year with raspberry colored tubular flowers. Based on its growth habit it is an ideal candidate for the middle of a border.
At the other end of the bed is a more compact hummingbird mint named Agastache ‘Acapulco Salmon & Pink™’. It is part of a popular Acapulco series that come in a variety of colors. As the name suggests it has a pretty blend of salmon and pink flowers. The shape of this hummingbird mint is reminiscent of a catmint (Nepeta) and it sprawls to form a low-growing mound that produces colorful spires of flowers.