Common camas

A drought-hardy western-native subshrub (long known as Zauschneria) that lights up dry, rocky ground with scarlet tubular flowers from midsummer until frost - exactly when migrating and resident hummingbirds need a late-season nectar source. Slender, highly-branched stems carry small grey-green lance-shaped leaves; the whole plant thrives on full sun, lean soil, and very little water once established.

A dry-country wildflower of the Intermountain West whose narrow, scarlet, tubular flowers line a slender stalk that rises about 3 feet above a low rosette of glaucous blue-green leaves. The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center documents it blooming red from May into August on dry, gravelly soils, and it is one of the classic hummingbird-pollinated penstemons. Deeply drought-tolerant once established - best on lean, well-drained ground where it is not over-watered.

Whorled milkweed (Asclepias verticillata) is the slenderest and most drought-tolerant of the common native milkweeds, a fine-textured perennial of prairies, glades, and dry open ground across most of central and eastern North America. It grows 12 to 24 inches tall on wiry unbranched stems clothed in narrow, needle-like leaves set in whorls, and carries small umbels of greenish-white flowers from midsummer into early fall, later than most milkweeds. Like all Asclepias it is a monarch host plant, and its late nectar feeds bees and butterflies when little else is flowering. It wants full sun and lean, dry soil, and it is tougher and less bulky than common milkweed, though it spreads by rhizome and can form a wandering colony on good ground. All parts are toxic, and whorled milkweed is one of the more poisonous milkweeds to grazing livestock, so keep it out of pastures and hayfields.

A low North American native prairie perennial whose nodding, reddish-pink to purplish globular flowers in spring are upstaged by what follows: as the seeds form, the styles elongate into upright, feathery gray plumes that collectively read like wisps of smoke - the source of its many regional names (prairie smoke, old man's whiskers, long-plumed purple avens). A soft, hairy plant to about 16 inches with fern-like, pinnately divided leaves; it spreads slowly by rhizomes into a low groundcover and prefers cool-summer climates and dry, well-drained soil.

The first thing to settle about plains coreopsis is the thing seed racks are vaguest about: it is an ANNUAL. Missouri Botanical Garden types it that way without hedging, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center calls it an annual in its first line, and the plant germinates, flowers, sets seed and dies inside one season. That single fact separates it from the other two coreopsis in this group. Lanceleaf coreopsis and largeflower coreopsis are true perennials that gardeners routinely expect to be long-lived and that are not quite: MBG says lanceleaf needs dividing every two or three years in a border to stay robust; threadleaf coreopsis, already in this catalogue, is the one that genuinely persists. Plains coreopsis persists differently - not as a plant but as a seed bank. It self-sows heavily, and a stand that looks permanent after five years is five generations, not one plant, which is why it is the coreopsis for a meadow sowing and the wrong one for a slot in a border where something has to be there next April. What you get for accepting that is the best flower in the genus for the money. Solitary daisies one to two inches across, seven to nine bright yellow rays each painted maroon at the base around a red-brown disc, carried in quantity on wiry branching stems above finely cut foliage. MBG rates it showy and good for cutting, lists no serious insect or disease problems, and puts its maintenance at low. It is the plant behind most of the yellow in a roadside wildflower mix. Two cautions belong next to that. It self-seeds hard enough that MBG recommends deadheading specifically to prevent it, and it has naturalised across nearly fifty territories outside its home range, from Britain and Poland to Japan, Java and Fiji - so treat spare seed as something to bin rather than scatter. And the two best sources disagree about water: MBG grows it dry to medium and calls it drought tolerant, while the Wildflower Center rates its water use HIGH and says the good years are the wet ones. Both are describing the same plant honestly, and the record below explains why.

The original black-eyed Susan - a bristly-stemmed, short-lived meadow daisy that behaves as an annual, biennial, or brief perennial depending on where it grows. It blooms hard and early from seed, then carries itself forward by reseeding rather than by spreading into a permanent clump.