Echinacea
Echinacea spp.
Special Features
Well-regarded for attractive flowers and potential health benefits. Large, showy flowers with prominent raised centers (cones) and drooping petals in purple, pink, white, and orange. Leaves are often lance-shaped, coarse, and hairy.
Plant Specifications
Our team will help you integrate this plant into your landscape design
Growing Echinacea on Martha's Vineyard
Echinacea purpurea, the purple coneflower, is a foundational native perennial for Martha's Vineyard's sunny border and meadow garden programs, producing bold purple-pink daisy flowers with prominent orange-brown central cones from midsummer through fall in a display that is simultaneously ornamental and ecologically valuable for the island's native pollinators and seed-eating birds. Its adaptability to the island's lean, sandy, well-drained soils is outstanding, and once established it handles the coastal wind, salt air, and summer drought of exposed island garden positions with genuine self-reliance.
Deer resistance is generally reliable, though not absolute in situations of extreme browsing pressure on up-island properties. Estate Care professionals deadhead early-season flowers to extend the bloom period and then deliberately leave late-season seedheads standing through winter to provide food for goldfinches and other seed-eating birds active on the island through the colder months, balancing aesthetic management with ecological stewardship.
