Echinacea Plants

Echinacea, or coneflower, is one of those late-summer stalwarts that turns a border from "doing fine" to genuinely glorious, just as everything else starts flagging. Daisy-like flowers with a raised central cone sit atop sturdy stems from June right through to September, and the bees and butterflies queue up for them like it's last orders.

We grow three quite different characters. Echinacea Purpurea Alba is the tall, dependable one: a metre of cool white rays around a green-gold cone, and because it's the straight species rather than a fancy hybrid, it's the toughest of the three in a British winter. Echinacea Red Pearl is the compact showstopper, saturated red daisies at knee height that need no staking and cut beautifully for a jug indoors. And Echinacea Cheyenne Spirit is the lucky dip: a seed-raised mix where every plant flowers a different shade of cream, yellow, orange, scarlet or purple, so a group of five looks like nobody planned it, because nobody did.

A quick word of honesty, in proper Ashridge style: the coloured hybrids (Red Pearl and Cheyenne Spirit) are genuinely short-lived in wet British gardens. It's winter wet on the crown that finishes them off, not the cold, so give them sharp drainage, full sun, and skip the November mulch, and you'll get several good years out of them. Alba, being closer to the wild species, shrugs off a soggy winter far better.

All three arrive as 2L pot-grown plants, ready to get straight into the ground, with our usual guarantee and Which? Best Plant Supplier service behind them.