Verbena canadensis ‘Homestead Purple’

'Homestead Purple' is one of the great garden discoveries of the modern South, a trailing perennial verbena found not in a breeding plot but by the side of a Georgia road. In the early 1990s the University of Georgia horticulturists Michael Dirr and Allan Armitage drove past a sheet of royal-purple bloom at an old homestead, turned around, and gathered cuttings from a plant the owner said had simply grown there for years. That roadside find became one of the most popular perennials in American gardens, and the botanists gave the plant the name of the place it was found.

Botanically the plant belongs to the rose vervain, a Southeastern native long known as Verbena canadensis and now often filed under Glandularia canadensis. From a fast, low, trailing mat of finely toothed dark green leaves rise rounded clusters of small, deep royal-purple, tubular flowers, two to three inches across and thick with butterflies and other pollinators, blooming from late spring through early fall with little pause.

The low, spreading habit makes 'Homestead Purple' a natural groundcover, tumbling over a wall, spilling from a container, or carpeting the front of a sunny border in a long-running wash of purple. Give full sun and sharp drainage, and pair the flowers with silver foliage, other sun perennials, and warm-season annuals for a planting that carries color through the heat of summer.

Native from Virginia to Florida and west to Colorado and Mexico, 'Homestead Purple' is hardy in the warmer zones and evergreen where winters stay mild, dying back and returning in colder gardens, or grown as an annual at the cold edge. Deadhead or shear lightly in midsummer to keep the mat fresh and blooming, and give the plant room to root as the trailing stems run.