Painted Daisies

I’m on an ongoing quest to find perennial substitutes for annual flowers. We plant few each year now, but every year we add more and more perennials and they make it even easier to put together arrangements and bouquets that are not dependent on the labor and resources that annuals require.

While more casual in appearance, Painted Daisies offer some similarities to annual cosmos. They have similar colors: light pink, medium pink, and dark pink (for white we have regular shasta daisies). They grow with a sturdy habit and have a reliable vase life. And- there’s no extreme urgency to pick them right away. They have a wider harvest window.

Sometimes people ask me how I find the plants we grow here, because they’re often not listed on standard cut flower garden lists. The answer is that we go first to nature. We look at the areas around our property. We look at the meadow behind our farm. We see what does well in the wild and then we see if there are appropriate “sister” plants that might have more appeal to our customers.

The wild roadside daisies we see here in our area are a good clue that painted daisies will be well suited to our location, too. They have the sentimental appeal of daisies, but they interest of something a little different. They add an easy pop of color and they mature faster for us (early June) than cosmos, which can only be planted out after the last frost. If harvested, they bloom again during the same season.

Painted daisies are said to grow about 3ft tall. We have some plants under cover and they are growing 4ft tall. They are hardy down to zone 3.

Our seeds are from Swallowtail Garden Seeds