The name is the Greek word for flame, given to the genus for the intensity of the color, and phlox is one of the few great garden genera that is almost entirely North American. Nearly every species grown in gardens worldwide, the summer border phlox of English cottage gardens included, traces back to plants collected in the American East and shipped across the Atlantic in the eighteenth century.

Phlox divaricata, the woodland phlox, is the one that carpets a Southern hardwood floor pale blue in April, and the plants take dry shade better than the delicate look suggests. Phlox pilosa 'Eco Happy Traveler' runs gently through a sunny meadow planting in rose-pink; Phlox carolina 'Kim' and Phlox paniculata 'Shortwood' carry the tall summer bloom, and both hold far better mildew resistance than the old border phlox that gave the group a bad name. All of them are worked hard by butterflies and by the long-tongued moths that can reach the bottom of the narrow flower tube.