Lantana montevidensis

Where the shrubby lantanas stand up, Lantana montevidensis lies down and travels. This is the trailing lantana, a low, weeping member of the verbena family, Verbenaceae, native to the warm grasslands of southern South America, from southern Brazil across Uruguay and Paraguay into Argentina. The species carries a place name in the epithet: montevidensis means of Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital near which the plant was first gathered and described, so the botanical name is really a small geography lesson tucked into Latin.

Since leaving the pampas the trailing lantana has become one of the most planted groundcovers of warm gardens worldwide, valued wherever summers run long and water runs short. The oval, deep green leaves are strongly scented, giving off a sharp herbal smell when brushed that most browsing animals decline, which is part of why deer and rabbits pass the plant by. As with the rest of the genus the foliage is not for eating, and the small dark fruits are best left to the birds; the value here is ornamental and ecological rather than edible. Bees and butterflies, on the other hand, treat the flowers as a reliable filling station, and the trailing lantana blooms so steadily that the buffet rarely closes.

The flowers themselves are the color of dusk, clusters of small lavender to violet-purple florets, each with a paler, sometimes creamy eye, carried in flat little heads just above the foliage. In frost-free gardens the show runs nearly year-round, and elsewhere from spring until cold weather calls a halt. The stems root as they run, weaving a dense, weed-smothering mat perhaps a foot or two deep and spreading three to five feet or more, and where a stem meets an edge the growth simply pours over the lip in a soft violet waterfall.

Put that trailing habit to work: let the plant cascade over a retaining wall, spill from a raised bed or tall container, ramble down a hot bank too steep to mow, or knit together the front of a dry, sunny border. Full sun brings the heaviest bloom, though the trailing lantana tolerates light shade better than the shrubby kinds do. Lean, sharply drained soil is all the plant asks, and once established the groundcover shrugs off drought and the reflected heat of paving and stone. In the frost-free Deep South the mat stays evergreen; farther north the trailing lantana behaves as a root-hardy perennial, so shear the frosted top in early spring and let fresh runners return from the base. Set the purple against silver artemisia, gold lantana, or blue plumbago for a planting built to take the worst of summer.