Purple coneflower: Great native plant to attract butterflies and birds

Perfect for building a wildflower meadow

Few flowers light up a garden with bees and butterflies quite like Purple Coneflower.

Plant the native species of purple coneflower, spread the seeds around your garden and enjoy the benefits of these strong, upright native prairie-based plants that are truly magnets for swallowtails, painted ladies, monarchs, and an assortment of fritillaries.

Birds like them too, including hummingbirds that are attracted to the plant while it is in bloom and goldfinches, blue jays and cardinals who depend on the plants for its abundance of seed throughout the winter.

Stick with the Native coneflowers

More recently, coneflowers have become so popular that they are now available in a variety of colours including white, yellow, orange, red and even green. Plant them if you wish, but make sure the native species of coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) has a prominent spot in the garden.

The yellow coneflower (Ratibida pinnata) and thin-leaved purple coneflower are perfect companion plants to the more traditional purple cousin. They are also easy to grow, do well in a variety of soil types and are hardy from zones 3-7.

This beautiful yellow swallowtail stops at our purple coneflower to drink in its rich nectar.

A prairie meadow in your backyard for the bees, butterflies and birds

Most of us in southwestern Ontario stretching up into northeastern United States define our living and gardening area as the deciduous forest zone.

While this holds true for the most part, Lorraine Johnson writes in Grow Wild! Native Plant Gardening in Canada, parts of our gardening zones fall in “the most easterly range of the tallgrass prairie ecosystem.”

She writes: “For the gardeners whose lots are treeless and, for whatever reason, have no plans to plant trees, this sunny-meadow model can form the basis of a native-plant garden.”

What better opportunity to experiment with the Coneflower family along with black-eyed Susans and meadow grasses. Even a large sunny area in your woodland garden would be the ideal spot to create a native wildflower meadow garden.

The importance of these gardens cannot be underestimated.

In her book Our Native Bees, (see my article here) Paige Embry explores the concept of turning turf, or at least a portion of the lawn, into a prairie meadow to attract native bees and butterflies. She points to efforts made in the United States by golf courses to take advantage of great swaths of high-maintenance lawn and turn them into low-maintenance native prairie meadow.

“If the idea of flowers growing in the grassy lawn isn’t quite achievable yet, there’s always the golf course route. Take out some of that lawn and convert it into a home and dining hall for bees. It’s all a matter of rethinking normal,” she writes.

As one researcher at the University of Minnesota explains: “the hardest part of getting a bee lawn into use isn’t developing the seed mix; it’s dealing with people’s vision of what a lawn should be….”

If you are interested in creating a naturalized border or mini meadow, be sure to check out my post Fields of Gold: Sunflowers and Goldfinches.

Yellow Swallowtail sips from a purple coneflower.

Plant coneflowers from seed to save money

Don’t be surprised if your plant dies out after a time. In some situations, purple coneflower can be considered a short-lived perennial. Although your main plant may die off, by sprinkling the seed about the garden you should have a nice regular supply of the plants.

The good news is that they are great plants for those looking to save money and don’t mind growing them from seed. (For more ways to save money gardening, check out my earlier story here.)

They are easy to grow from seed. Collect the seed from your own plants, or from a neighbour’s plants (after asking them of course) or you can purchase them at your local nursery.

The seeds benefit from a cold-moist stratification method to break down the hard seed coat and ensure that it germinates at the proper time, however, coneflowers are not dependent on this for germination.

Germination is improved if the coneflower seeds are placed in a container of damp sand and placed in a refrigerator for about two months. In spring plant them directly in the garden or get a head start by using grow lights.

If all that sounds too complicated, just sprinkle them throughout the garden in the fall in areas you would like to grow a clump of them and exercise some patience. Nature will take care of th stratification process and the seeds should germinate in spring provided critters, including birds did not find them first.

Learn to know what the seedlings look like so you don’t mistake them as weed seedlings.

Are Purple Coneflowers easy to grow?

The plants are easy to grow in most soils, are not bothered by pests, require little to know fertilizer and can take some shade. For best performance, a sunny location is best.

The coneflower is hardy from zones 3-9, and native to Eastern and Central United States from Canada into more southern areas.

How large do coneflowers grow?

It grows to about 4-feet high, but can get to 5-feet under the right conditions. Flowering begins in about mid-summer and continues to flower through to the fall. Like Black-eyed Susans, definitely leave the flowers on throughout the winter months not only for their aesthetic value but, more importantly, as a valuable food source for birds.

The coneflowers’ strong stems and spent flowers stand high above even heavy snow accumulation to provide perfect landing spots for birds to feed on the abundance of seeds.

Plants grown from seed, either manually or naturally spread around the garden, can bloom in the first year, but expect to wait a full growing season before you see blooms on the plants.