Penstemon dissectus

This rare Penstemon is a very attractive perennial with deeply cut, fern-like leaves and tall spikes of pinkish-violet flowers, each two-lipped tube carrying the yellow-bearded sterile stamen that gives the genus the name beardtongue. The dissected foliage is not merely a nice feature; it is unique in the entire genus, and no other Penstemon anywhere in the world has leaves like these. Bloom comes in late spring on stems of a foot to two, held well above a low basal clump.

The range is about as small as a range gets. Penstemon dissectus occurs only in Georgia, and only around the sandstone outcrops of the Altamaha Grit, a formation on the coastal plain that surfaces in scattered patches through longleaf pine and scrub oak woodland and supports a whole suite of plants found nowhere else. The habitat is exactly what the old catalog description says: sunny situations on shallow soil over rock, often with water seeping across it in winter and spring and baking dry by summer. That combination, wet feet in the cool season and hard drought in the hot one, is unusual and explains a good deal about how the plant behaves in a garden.

Being an endemic on a rare and shrinking habitat, this species carries real conservation weight. The outcrops are threatened by trash dumping and off-road vehicle damage, and there are not many of them. Nursery-propagated stock matters here in a way it does not for a common plant: growing it well in gardens takes pressure off wild populations and keeps material in circulation. Probably first made available to gardeners by Woodlanders, and still offered by almost nobody else. The stock behind our current plants was collected by Jonas Meyer.

The good news for gardeners is that it does well in ordinary garden soil, provided that soil drains. Full sun, lean ground, and no standing water in summer; a raised bed, a rock garden, a gravel garden, or the top of a wall all suit. Like most penstemons the enemy is winter wet on a heavy soil, not cold. Cut the spent flower stems after bloom and leave the basal rosette alone. Plants are relatively short-lived, as the genus tends to be, so let some seed ripen and drop if you want a colony to persist. Good with Coreopsis, Liatris, Phemeranthus teretifolius, and little bluestem, which is close to the company it keeps in the wild.