Penstemon smallii

Small's beardtongue is one of the showiest and most obliging of the eastern native penstemons, a Southern Appalachian wildflower that carries tall spires of lavender-pink to rosy-purple tubular flowers in late spring and holds them for weeks. Each bloom is pale-throated and finely striped inside, a landing-strip for the bumblebees that work the flowers, and the whole plant rises from a handsome rosette of purple-veined foliage on reddish stems.

The genus name penstemon points to the fifth stamen, the sterile, bearded staminode that gives the beardtongues their common name, and the epithet honors John Kunkel Small, the botanist who did so much to document the flora of the Southeast. In the wild, this is a plant of the southern mountains, of North Carolina and Tennessee down through Georgia and into Alabama, at home on rocky slopes, bluffs, and the sunny edges of woods where the drainage is sharp and the competition thin.

Small's beardtongue is easy where happy, which means sun to part shade and, above all, soil that drains freely; like most penstemons, the plant resents wet feet in winter far more than any cold. The catch is that the perennial is short-lived, often bowing out after two or three good seasons, but a settled plant sows itself freely around, so a patch tends to renew itself and drift gently through a bed over the years. Hardy through USDA zones 5 to 8, the basal rosette stays green or nearly so through mild winters.

Set Small's beardtongue in a rock garden, a native or pollinator planting, a lean sunny border, or a woodland edge, and let the plant reseed into the gaps. Bees and hummingbirds come to the tubular flowers, and the foliage feeds the caterpillars of the common buckeye butterfly, so a small stand pulls real wildlife into the garden. Named North Carolina Wildflower of the Year in 1984, this is a native that has earned its admirers, and an easy one to start with.