Caroline,

Hooray for the birds! The coneflowers look terrific too!

Dawn

I've never heard of Coneflowers. Are they annuals? Easy to grow? I need easy to grow, and still looking for veggies/herbs/flowers that can grow in shaded sun (below a tree). Those look very pretty.

Mari,

Purple coneflowers (Echinacea) (and white-flowered and yellow-flowered ones as well) have been around forever, and are very tough and hardy and handle our brutal summer heat especially well. There are wild, native ones and then all kinds of hybrids have been bred from them. In the last few years, plant breeders have brought out lines of coneflowers in new color ranges.....thanks to articifial breeding you can get them in some colors seldom seen in native echinaceas. Some of them are quite lovely, but I like the native purple coneflowers the best. Caroline has an especially beautiful stand of purple coneflowers!

I'll link some coneflower info below. Mine have always grown best in full sun, but they probably could handle light shade for part of the day. The more shade, though, the less they will bloom.

I always deadhead them throughout the summer, but then leave the flowerheads on in the autumn because a lot of the birds enjoy the seeds....and any seeds they drop or miss tend to sprout in the spring.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Coneflower Info

Thanks for looking mariposa, These were hard for me to get
started, grew some from seeds and my neighbor gave me a
few of hers, they finally took off. I have another bed of
them and now they need to be divided, getting way too thick. Mine comes up every year. All in full sun.They do
come in RED but I don't like them as well, jmo :))

Coneflowers used to grow wild in the fields here. DH has memories of digging the root as a youngster. His family was very poor and they sold the root to somebody that made medicine from it. Farmers didn't like people digging coneflower roots out of their fields, unless they had a special agreement with them that they would fill up the hole that digging the root makes.

I haven't noticed coneflower growing wild in the fields in a long time. But maybe I just haven't been paying attention, or driving around in the country at the right time.

Ilene,

I think they thought that the echinacea root was good for colds and respiratory infections? I don't know if modern research supports that belief though.

I haven't seen purple coneflowers growing wild in the fields in a long time either....and I suspect the heavy use of glyphosates like Round-up these last couple of decades have cut down on a lot of the "weeds" that we used to see regularly in farm fields.

I do have the native yellow-flowered clasping coneflower in the pasture here, but it isn't really a coneflower--despite its' name--it is a rudbeckia.

I had a pretty good stand of purple coneflowers in my cottage border around the veggie garden for several years, but last year's heavy rains about finished them off. I'm hoping the couple that are left will reseed and rebuild the population. I guess I'll toss a handful of purple coneflower seed into that bed this winter to help the process along.

Dawn