Homestead Purple Verbena

Your go-to plant when you want easy, colorful ground-cover, the Homestead Purple Verbena is a fantastic spreader, and flowers steadily from spring right up to frost. Growing quickly into an open mound of stems and blooms up to 3 feet across, it stays low, no more than a foot tall, and produces a profusion of colorful, purple flowerheads from spring to fall. The stems often root as they go, but don’t worry, it is very easy to control its spread, and isn’t going to become a problem. The dome-shaped flower heads are an inch or two across, packed with tubular flowers with a flaring mouth. Amazingly, this is a plant that actually grows better in drier, poor soil than it does in well-prepared beds, so it’s the ultimate plant for time-short gardeners and for difficult spots. Use it in front of shrubs, on dry, sunny slopes, among taller perennials, and in planters too, where it spills out joyfully. Reliable even in areas with very hot summers, humid or dry, and an all-round champion for coloring tough places.

• Beautiful purple flowers on a sprawling mound of stems
• Blooms from spring right through to the first frost
• Very popular with bees, butterflies, other pollinators, and hummingbirds
• A great choice for sunny, dry spots in poor and rocky soil
• Annual in cold zones, deciduous in zone 6, and evergreen from zone 7

Plant the Homestead Purple Verbena in full sun for good results – it isn’t shade-loving. Grow it in any well-drained soil. It enjoys poor, dry and sandy soils but will grow well in moist, richer soil, but not in wet places. Evergreen and reliable from zone 7, and will survive in zone 6 if mulched for the winter. Grow as an annual in colder zones – it roots easily from cuttings to overwinter it. Almost never has any pest or disease problems, it is very easy to grow almost anywhere. Cut back in fall or early spring – new growth will quickly sprout from the roots.