Skip to Content

Introducing Columbine Meadow Rue & Coyote Mint + More

Columbine Meadow Rue thalictrum
Thalictrum aquilegiifolium (Columbine Meadow Rue)

New and Unique Plants for Spring 019

By David Salman

New plants are for most gardeners, one of the great joys of gardening. To find a new and beautiful plant is like meeting a new friend.

As a plant breeder and collector, I’m always on the lookout for new plants.  So it’s always a pleasure when the New Year arrives to introduce High Country Garden gardeners to plants that I think have great potential of becoming a valued new friend.  But just having a pretty flower is just not enough anymore; potential friends need to be more than just a pretty face.  With climate change in full swing, we need to understand that the collective power of our gardens in this country and across the world to sequester CO2, provide food for pollinators and provide habitat for songbirds, the plants we garden with should help to support these goals.

Columbine Meadow Rue is an Old World perennial, grown for both its flowers and attractive foliage. When the lavender-pink, late spring flowers fade, the delicate columbine-like foliage provides a visual treat for the rest of the growing season.  A herbaceous plant, it will die back to the ground in winter. The flowers are also good for pollinating bees and butterflies. But the foliage is resistant to browsing deer and rabbits.

In the western US where the sun is much stronger than in the hazy skies of the eastern US, plant it in partial shade so as not to scorch the delicate foliage. Because it does well in partial or dappled shade, it’s a fine choice for under-planting shade trees and beds where sun lovers fail.

Very durable and easy-to-grow, it likes a compost-enriched garden loam with medium to moist growing conditions.  Thalictrum is a wonderful companion plant for Sedge (Carex) and Kashmir Sage (Phlomis cashmeriana). This species is native to Europe and central Asia. Zones 5-8.

Columbine Meadow Rue in Bloom
Thalictrum aquilegiifolium (Columbine Meadow Rue)

Coyote Mint provides months of summer color with its aromatic light blue powder puff flowers. This western native wildflower is a favorite nectar source for bees and butterflies.  Although much beloved by alpine rock gardeners, plants of this species in general cultivation are typically from very high elevations (around 10,000 ft. in UT). Their high mountain origins typically make them very unhappy when grown at lower elevations, where most folks garden. 

Monardella odaratissima
Monardella odoratissima FlowerKisser™ Arizona Beauty | FlowerKisser™ Arizona Beauty Coyote Mint

However, several years ago, I found a colony of Monardella odoratissima at a lower elevation (8,500 ft. elevation) in the foothills of east-central Arizona. I took cuttings and brought them back to Santa Fe, where I rooted them and planted the new plants into my test garden. They have performed wonderfully. I especially like to run my hands over the plants to release the very pleasing sweet, minty scent from their flowers and foliage. It’s a small compact grower that enjoys sun and part sun growing conditions in non-clay soils. Coyote Mint is best grown in the western US as humid summer heat and lots of rain is not to its liking.

Individual plants are not long lived (usually 3 to 4 years), but set plentiful seed and will produce volunteer seedlings when the seed heads are allowed to ripen and stay on the plant through winter. (Mulch them with small gravel mulch to encourage volunteers.) Because they are such long bloomers, the plant is also excellent in perennial container plantings as a “spiller” along the edges of the pot’s rim.

Recommended companion plants include Hymenoxys scaposa (Thrift Leaf Perky Sue), Penstemon pinifolius (yellow or orange flowered cultivars) and Festuca ‘Siskiyou Blue’.

The New FlowerKisser™ Introductions – Outstanding Plants for Attracting Pollinators

I’d like to call you attention to more of the new FlowerKisser™ brand of pollinator-friendly perennials including FlowerKisser™ After Midnight English Lavender, FlowerKisser™ Dark Shadows Sage and FlowerKisser™ Coral-Pink Sage.  I’ve bred and/or selected them for their outstanding flower colors, resilient garden performance, resistance to browsing animals and the outstanding aromatic fragrance of the flowers and foliage.

Lavender After Midnight
FlowerKisser™ After Midnight English Lavender
Coral Pink Sage
FlowerKisser™ Coral-Pink Sage
Dark Shadows Sage
FlowerKisser™ Dark Shadows Sage

The above are but a few of our new plants from High Country Gardens for this year.  Go to the home page and click on New for 2019 to pull up the whole list. 

© All articles are copyrighted by High Country Gardens. Republishing an entire High Country Gardens blog post or article is prohibited without written permission. Please feel free to share a short excerpt with a link back to the article on social media websites, such as Facebook and Pinterest.