I dug up what I thought were Salvia coccinia plants, to transplant elsewhere, but as they got a little bigger, they turned out to be cowpen daisies. I transplanted a great blue lobelia next to one of the daisies, and was concerned about its longterm welfare. I wish the cowpen daisies would repel the chipmunks that have been taunting me lol. From the response, I'm assuming none of you has grown Verbesina encelioides.

Well, they aren't anywhere near the top of my list of favorites either.

I started out with the thought of growing Verbesina virginica, the frost flower, for the pollinators, but discovered cowpen daisy in the Native American Seeds catalog and went with that instead. I think I have enough fall pollinator plants, because the snakeplants, wood asters, and smooth blue asters have volunteered all over the place, and I also have a few more well behaved asters and goldenrods, plus the weedy Canada goldrnrods, which need to be pulled out.

Yeah, I have a battle going with frost flowers (which I never planted) that keep returning as volunteers in my back yard.

I'm glad I didn't grow them. Like I said before I have a lot of natives that reproduce at an alarming rate. I still love them all, I really do. Sometimes it's like, the plants that you wish would spread the most, are the slowist to do so ?

Well part of what usually (not always) makes me not like a plant is spreading rampantly...so that makes sense.

I grow these in Central Texas in calcarious uplands. They do well in the alkaline clay and the amended caliche. My soil is lean nasty stuff mostly. They are annuals that grow about 3-5' . They might grow larger in gentler richer soils . They come back every year and do well by me. I don't water them except for some clothes hand washing soapy water that gets thrown on them and the rinse water.. We are hot and very dry and they are struggling. They are great tractors of butterflies and bees. I let them grow in a dense bank. Plan on having an area of them . not one plant in a mixed border.

If you want seed, I have plenty of them . PM me.

Oh, ok. That looks right. I had about 3 Mexican hats still alive going into winter. Now there's just one left. There are 3 different native Sedums that I'm growing. The S. ternatum is nice and can handle shade. I've had the ternatum for a few years. The other 2 that are new and winter sowed are S. pulchellus and S. glaucophyllum. I think the flowers on the S

pulchellus look like pink starfish.