WANTED: Verbascum copper rose, summer sorbet, and cherry helen. I have alba, Carribean Crush and Olympia to trade, along with other kinds of seeds.

I used to live near Dayton, OH and with the soils we have in SW Ohio (very high clay content) its often difficult to get the drainage required to grow verbascum long-term, in my experience. They like lean, gritty, well-drained soil - they are great in rock gardens. In my garden our clay would just become saturated in the spring and winter months, which would kill mine off. The spot that mine thrived, alongside with lavender and thyme was alongside our front walkway and our driveway - it was hot and full sun there, and to make it worse - they backfilled with almost pure sand instead of topsoil!! I was pretty annoyed at first, but tried out the aforementioned species and they just thrived in the quick-draining sandy substrate. Verbascums don't like soggy roots - that'll be the death of them. If you want to grow them I'd recommend mixing some sand and pea gravel into the soil all around them - even setting the rootball on a couple inches of pea gravel for drainage. Give them full sun. Hope that helps. ~Mike

Hi Marcia, thanks for your reply. They're all hybrids (sterile?) and I cut them back as soon as they're finished flowering to try and prolong life span. I read somewhere that they tend to be biennial in nature??? It's the first time I've tried verbascum over the years, and I really like them so will be disappointed if I've messed up. I guess I could try to replace from the box stores. HD sometimes stocks them but I promised myself I wouldn't buy anymore plants this year (yeah, sure). Anyways, I checked it again this morning and there's new growth. Maybe the top just hasn't had time to catch up to what I did to the bottom! I did salvage the root and hope to propagate from some cuttings.

I see, these ones are just particularly undulated!