Click below to listen to my 2 min. Garden Bite radio show: Lantana
A friend of mine asked me about a beautiful flower she’d seen on one of my Garden Bite instagram photos. LANTANA!!
The National Garden Bureau has deemed 2020, the Year of the Lantana. They pick a perennial, an annual, an herb, a bulb and a shrub to represent each year.
Lantana are native to tropical regions… annuals for those of us in cold climates! They are a must-have for creating a pollinator haven.
These plants are REALLY attractive to butterflies, bees and hummingbirds on so many levels: sweet nectar for food, attractive scent, bright color, and the overall flower form (it’s a literal landing pad!). These flat-topped “landing pad” flowers consist of clusters of tubular blooms that together make an umbel flower form.
Lantana flowers come in single or multiple colors. Multiple colored lantana flowers change color as they mature. They love heat and can handle drought and just keep delivering.
Oh, it gets better, breeders have recently introduced sterile, or near sterile, Lantana, which means the plant never sets seed, so they continue to bloom and bloom and bloom through the entire season!
Those new varieties include ‘Gold Mound’, Hot Blooded™, ‘New Gold’, Patriot™ Series, Sunburst™ Series, and the Bloomify™ Series.
There are compact plants and trailing plants, making containers look even more awesome. They love sun.
And here’s a cool tidbit, deer and rabbits avoid lantana as they find the odor of their leaves disagreeable!
National Garden Bureau pictures HERE.