Hummingbird and Butterfly Gardening: Porterweed ...., 1 by beckygardener

beckygardener wrote:
When I went to purchase the purple porterweed last weekend, they had pink, peach, and then the smaller blue/purple as well. I had never seen pink flowers on porterweed before. Don't know if it produces lots of nectar too. Sometimes the hybrids aren't as attractive to the bugs and birds.

Rox - Any porterweed that I have seen always has the long spikes of flowers on it. As to whether or not yours will gets big, that I am not sure of. There are at least two types of porterweed in my area. One is the native porterweed (Stachytarpheta jamaicensis) and the other is what I consider the "giant" variety (Stachytarpheta urticifolia) which has much larger leaves and flowers and actually has branches forming a shrub. I find that the butterflies (and supposedly the hummers, too) love this larger variety because the larger flowers of course produce much more nectar. But both are attractive to butterflies.

Here is a photo of Stachytarpheta jamaicensis which I have in my backyard garden bed. I also just bought another one for my front garden bed. It stays a bit more compact and doesn't have the branching that the larger variety porterweed has. This has been in the ground a year already and you can see that it hasn't grown very large.

This message was edited Apr 20, 2007 9:53 PM