Virginia Bunchflower

This is an easy, adaptable plant that should be much more widely grown. It's hard to believe that such a small plant can produce such a h...Read Moreuge floral display.

In spring, from a short fleshy rhizome emerges a rosette of light green (NOT dark/black) strap-like leaves a foot high. (Emerging fans look like a daylily's, only smaller.) A strong, well-branched flower stalk then ascends to heights of up to 5', June-August. Flowers are small but numerous and last for months, white or cream at first, slowly aging to a vivid kelly green/chartreuse or sometimes dark purple. Slightly malodorous. The inflorescence remains attractive even as it goes to seed. Staking is not needed.

Plant it in the border where the low basal foliage will be concealed by other low plants as it slowly enters dormancy in mid-summer, while the flowers go on and on. (This is like figuring out how to place the tall bulbous alliums, whose foliage disintegrates before they bloom.) Plants can be spaced a foot apart without crowding.

This is a meadow plant native to eastern and central North America. It tolerates occasionally dry conditions but prefers regular moisture---in the wild, it's a facultative wetland plant, so it doesn't mind wet soil or poor drainage. Adaptable about soils, clay to sandy, acid or alkaline. Performs well under ordinary border conditions in full sun or part shade. Once mature, it blooms most years if well fed.

I think of it as doing well where you can grow Camassia. The biggest obstacle to its commercial production and widespread popularity as a garden plant is its slow growth---it takes several years to grow this from seed to blooming size.

Usually propagated by seed. Seed loses viability quickly unless stored in damp sand at 4C. Nursery-propagated bare roots are commercially available and not expensive. It may take several years for plants to reach blooming size, and the floral display increases for several years after that. (Plants can take ten years to reach mature size, though they start blooming after five years or so.) Mature plants eventually produce multiple crowns, but they do not need regular division.

Consensus seems to have been reached about the name change to Veratrum virginicum.

Native range extends from NY to IA and south to FL and TX. It is rare or extirpated in 10 states, and threatened or endangered in 6 of those.

Great native "lily". Pretty easy to grow so long as you give it a moist spot. Gradually goes dormant after flowering in early summer.