Keep Your Garden Colorful Year After Year With A Hummingbird-Friendly Flower

Having a beautiful hummingbird-filled garden doesn't have to be a distant dream, it can be a reality. All it takes to have the hummingbird garden of your dreams is planting a great selection of plants that will attract hummingbirds, and keep them cool and hydrated by adding a mister to their bird bath. Adding an additional food source is a good idea as well. Hummingbirds are all about eating, so planting a variety of flowers they love is a sure-fire way to keep them coming back. One hummingbird-friendly flower that will add color to your garden year-after-year is the hoary vervain (Verbena stricta). This clump-forming perennial is native throughout the midwest, especially Missouri, and features tiny, purplish-blue flowers that form on spikes, sticking straight up in bunches.

One of the most popular features of hoary vervain is that it is self-seeding, which means once you plant it, it comes back every year on its own without having to be replanted. This is always a great feature for gardeners that don't want the extra work each year. If you don't want the flower to self-seed, remove the spent flowering spikes before the seeds reach maturity, a process known as deadheading. Another feature that pollinators like hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees love about the plant is the long bloom time, which runs about 4-6 weeks in July and August.

Hoary vervain is not an overly needy plant to grow. The best place to plant this pollinator-attracting plant in your garden is a spot that gets full sun as it thrives on dry soil that is well-draining and loamy and does best when it gets at least 6 hours of sun each day. This plant does the best in hardiness zones 4-7. Hoary vervain is an easy one to start from seed so it is the perfect flower to choose when you are looking for something to start indoors in a simple seed starter pot. Keep in mind that when you start this flower from seed it will not bloom until the second year. 

Watering needs are not excessive for the hoary vervain. Usually a full watering once per week is sufficient to keep the soil at the right moisture level of moist, not wet, and well-drained (avoid over watering). This lovely plant is also very drought tolerant and can handle drier soils unlike some other flowers, but make sure it doesn't dry out too much between waterings. If you prefer to grow your hoary vervain in containers, you will be happy to know they do well in pots and can be indoor plants as well as outdoor plants although you won't get the hummingbird-attracting features they provide. Care indoors is the same as outdoors: Well-draining soil, plenty of sunlight, not too much water, and fertilizer once a month.