Verbena Bonariensis

Verbena! The cheerleader flower. 😊 This beautiful plant offers gorgeous purple pops of color all summer long on tall straight stems. It’s super useful and the pollinators love it. But we have some special recommendations for getting it started.

Here are some quick notes about how we use verbena throughout the season. It blooms over a long period- months here. And it’s so nice to have that bright purple later in the summer and early fall when there is less of it - we have no tulips, lupine, allium, etc this time of year where we might get that sort of vibrant purple otherwise.

Verbena can be tricky to start from seed indoors (our experience). If you want a reliable crop and you’re just getting a start with this plant, I recommend purchasing plugs. Once you have a crop of verbena blooming, you will have a good yield of seedlings the following spring if you leave some flowers on and let them go to seed. Verbena likes the cold and natural stratification of winter weather- even cold weather like here in zone 4. We have verbena popping up in all of the places where we grew it last year, where there is favorable soil. The seedlings are easy to identify and pluck out or transplant in the spring. We just let Mother Nature do her thing and she returns the best verbena to us now.