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Largeflower tickseed

Joanna Boisse / Wikimedia Commons - CC BY-SA 4.0

Largeflower tickseed

Coreopsis grandiflora

Largeflower tickseed is sold as a perennial and behaves like one for about two years. Missouri Botanical Garden says plainly that the plants are somewhat short-lived and that self-seeding is what perpetuates a good planting; the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center is blunter still, recording that it is not reliably perennial and self-sows readily, becoming weedy. Those are two descriptions of the same plant, and believing them is the whole difference between a stand that lasts and an expensive annual. What you are buying is a seed-perpetuated colony rather than a long-lived clump: the original crowns thin out after two or three seasons and volunteers carry the planting on, which means it survives only where there is bare soil to germinate in and where some flowers are allowed to set seed. Deadhead every head, every year, and the colony ends when the crowns do. The flowers are the largest of the common yellow tickseeds, 2 to 3 inches across, deep yellow rays notched at the tips around a darker golden disc, held one to a stem on slender erect stalks to about 24 inches. What it wants is the opposite of border hospitality: poor sandy or rocky soil with sharp drainage, full sun, and no irrigation. Missouri Botanical Garden records it as tolerant of heat, humidity and drought and names crown rot in moist, poorly drained soil as the way it dies, so the reliable method of killing it is kindness. Within this catalog it sits between plains coreopsis (Coreopsis tinctoria), a true annual that never pretends otherwise, and lanceleaf coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata), the other short-lived perennial and the plant it is most often mislabelled as. The leaves settle it: lanceleaf carries narrow, hairy, unlobed lance-shaped leaves gathered in a basal tuft, while largeflower has lobeless linear leaves at the base and pinnatifid, deeply lobed upper leaves cut into linear segments up the stem.

Native: 30 US states + 2 CA provinces

Climate fit: broad (87/100)

Pollinator

Border

Filler

Light

Full sun / Part sun

Water

Low water

Mature size

18-30" tall · 18" apart

Hardy in zones

4a-9b

very cold to frosty winters

AHS heat range

1-11

Plant range authored in AHS heat-zone terms.

Native in Illinois

Yes

Related products

Cold hardiness

These values are location-based: this location's current hardiness is the baseline, and the 2050 value is a projected future climate for this same location.

Now

Zone 6b

Plotwright

USDA Zone 6b

-5°F to 0°F

Well-suited

2050

2100

Zone 7a

Plotwright

0°F to 5°F

Well-suited

In plain terms: This location has cold winters. Its winters are projected to keep warming through 2050.

✓

Well-suited today and still thriving in 2050.

Heat tolerance

Heat tolerance values are location-based too: heat days today are observed at this site, and the 2050 value projects this same location under a future climate.

Loading AHS heat-zone data for this location...

Where this plant fits

Suitable across 42 ecoregions - 38 climate-resilient through 2070 · 1 suited today · 3 newly possible by 2070. Best matches first.

Appalachian mixed mesophytic forests

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Appalachian-Blue Ridge forests

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Arizona Mountains forests

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Atlantic coastal pine barrens

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Blue Mountains forests

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Central Pacific Northwest coastal forests

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Central Tallgrass prairie

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Central-Southern Cascades Forests

What it needs

Conditions

Light

Full sun / Part sun

Water

Low water

Spacing

18"

Habit

Short-lived clump-forming herbaceous perennial, 18 to 30 inches tall and 12 to 18 inches wide by Missouri Botanical Garden, which also records that it spreads by rhizomes. That creep is real but modest, and it is not what makes a stand grow: the expansion you see in year three is seedlings, not the parent clump travelling. Flowering stems are slender and erect and carry a single head each. The foliage is the identification. Lower leaves at the base of the plant are lobeless and linear; upper leaves are pinnatifid and deeply lobed into linear segments, which the Wildflower Center describes simply as dissected into linear segments. Stems are thin enough that a plant grown in rich, moist, fed soil flops, and Missouri Botanical Garden notes that compact forms are less likely to sprawl than the taller ones - the cultural advice to keep it lean and the design advice to keep it lean are the same advice.

Care tips

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Decide up front whether you want a tidy plant or a lasting one, because you cannot have both. Missouri Botanical Garden says the plants are somewhat short-lived and that self-seeding is what perpetuates a good planting. Deadhead everything and the stand ends with the original crowns in two or three years; leave a share of the heads and it renews itself from volunteers indefinitely.

•

Plant it lean and never water it once it is up. It thrives in poor, sandy or rocky soil with good drainage, and crown rot in moist, poorly drained soil is the named cause of death. Compost, feed and irrigation produce a taller, softer, floppier and shorter-lived plant, which is the opposite of every instinct a border gardener has.

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Give it full sun and real spacing. Powdery mildew, leaf spot and rust are all listed against the foliage, and all three are problems of shade, crowding and still air rather than of climate. Eighteen inches apart in open sun is a cheaper fix than any spray.

Lifecycle

Planting

Missouri Botanical Garden calls it easily grown in dry to medium moisture, well-drained soil in full sun, and says it thrives in poor, sandy or rocky soils with good drainage. Take the word poor literally - this is a plant for the unimproved edge of a bed, a gravel garden, a hot strip by a drive, or a meadow sowing, and it responds to compost and fertiliser by growing tall, soft and floppy. The Wildflower Center gives sandy soils and open sandy woods, roadsides and fields as its habitat. There is one point of genuine disagreement between the two records worth knowing before siting it: Missouri Botanical Garden lists it as full sun, the Wildflower Center gives part shade. Full sun is the safer instruction, because shade compounds the two known weaknesses at once, sprawl and foliar disease.

Transplanting

Container stock moves easily in spring or early autumn and establishes fast on a well-drained site. Established clumps lift and divide cleanly, and division is also the standard rejuvenation. What does not transplant is a self-sown seedling once it has run its taproot down into gravel; move volunteers small, in their first few weeks, or leave them where they chose.

Early growth

Water only to establish and then stop. The failure mode named by Missouri Botanical Garden is crown rot in moist, poorly drained soils, so an irrigated bed on clay is a worse site than a neglected one on sand. Do not mulch heavily over the crown, and do not feed. If seedlings are wanted, leave patches of bare mineral soil around the plants, because seed that lands on 3 inches of bark chip does not become anything.

Maturity

Two jobs and one decision. The jobs are deadheading, which Missouri Botanical Garden says encourages additional bloom and prevents unwanted self-seeding, and cutting the plant back hard in summer if the foliage sprawls or becomes unkempt. The decision is how long you want the planting to last, because those same jobs remove the seed the colony renews itself from. Missouri Botanical Garden recommends division every 2 to 3 years to maintain robustness in borders and other formal garden areas, and adds that the species may simply be grown as an annual. On the health side, foliage is susceptible to powdery mildew, leaf spot and rust, all of which are worse in shade, crowding and still air, and all of which are largely designed away by spacing the plants and giving them sun.

Propagation

Seed is the honest route and the one the plant itself uses. The Wildflower Center records it as easily grown from seed and notes that seeds of this genus generally germinate without pretreatment, so no cold stratification is needed; seed is commercially available. Mature plants may be increased by division, which is also how a named clone is kept true. Note that the widely sold cultivars in this species, including the Award of Garden Merit holder Early Sunrise, are seed strains raised to flower in their first year, so seed saved from a garden planting reverts toward the species rather than repeating the cultivar.

Pollination

Needs cross-pollination

Read the label carefully here, because it does not mean what it usually means. Each head is a composite carrying both fertile disc florets and showy ray florets, presented as an open landing platform with nothing hidden, and it is insect-pollinated: what it needs is a visitor, not a second cultivar planted as a pollinizer. No source cited on this record states the breeding system for Coreopsis grandiflora, and Plotwright will not assert self-incompatibility it cannot source, so this entry records the outcrossing requirement the floral construction implies and stops there. In practice pollination is never the limiting factor and the practical concern runs entirely the other way. Missouri Botanical Garden records that the plant freely self seeds and can become somewhat weedy and that prompt deadheading prevents unwanted self-seeding, and the Wildflower Center records that it self-sows readily. The management question for a gardener is how much seed to allow, not how to get any.

Plants don't grow alone

Nectar forage

Butterfly

Skipper butterflies (Hesperiidae (family-level entry))

Missouri Botanical Garden lists Butterflies under what this plant attracts, and Wikipedia records that it attracts bees and butterflies, but neither source names a species. Skippers are recorded here as the most likely group behind a category-level statement of this kind: they are short-tongued, they work open composite heads in full sun through the same June-to-August window, and a flat 2 to 3 inch disc is the shape they are built for. Marked plausible because the sources stop at the category.

Nectar forage

Butterfly

Pearl crescent (Phyciodes tharos)

A small eastern nymphalid that is on the wing continuously through the tickseed bloom period and feeds heavily at low, open, yellow composites. Listed on the same footing as the skippers - flower shape, height and flight period all fit, but no source cited here names it on Coreopsis grandiflora.

Nectar forage

Bee

Sweat bees (Lasioglossum spp.)

Small sweat bees are among the commonest visitors to shallow open composite heads across the whole of this species range, and they are generalists that will work a stand of tickseed from first flower to last. Plausible on flower architecture, not on a cited visitation record.

Nectar forage

Bee

European honeybee (Apis mellifera)

Wikipedia records that the plant attracts bees and butterflies, and an open composite in full sun over a long summer bloom is an easy, well-timed resource for a honey bee. Kept at plausible because that statement is a category note rather than an observation on this species, and because the native bees above are the more consequential visitors here.

Pollen forage

Bee

Long-horned bees (Melissodes spp.)

Melissodes species are the summer-flying long-horned bees of eastern and central North America, and a large share of them are Asteraceae specialists whose flight season is built around exactly this run of midsummer yellow composites. That makes them the most interesting likely visitor on this record and the reason the plant earns a pollinator design role. Recorded as plausible rather than as a specialist relationship because no source consulted names a bee genus on this species.

Pollen forage

Bee

Mining bees (Andrena spp.)

Andrena species are ground-nesting bees whose preferred nesting substrate is bare, sandy, well-drained soil - which is both the habitat this plant occupies and the exact soil condition its seedlings need. The pairing is genuinely mutual on a sandy site: the same bare mineral ground that keeps the colony self-sowing is the ground the bees nest in. Listed as plausible because it rests on shared habitat and timing rather than a published record.

Seed forage

Bird

American goldfinch (Spinus tristis)

Goldfinches are late-nesting seed specialists that time their broods to the ripening of composite seed, and tickseed heads left standing after bloom are the right size and season for them. Marked plausible and not documented because neither Missouri Botanical Garden nor the Wildflower Center records a bird use for this species. The management consequence is the same either way and is worth stating: seed heads left for birds are also the seed the colony renews itself from, so on this plant feeding the finches and keeping the planting alive are the same act.

For people

Not eaten by humans

An ornamental and a meadow component, not a food plant. None of the sources cited on this record documents any human food use, and none records toxicity either, so this entry says inedible rather than toxic and does not extrapolate a safety claim in either direction from silence. One sibling comparison is worth making because it invites exactly this mistake: plains coreopsis in this catalog carries the epithet tinctoria, which means used in dyeing, and it does have a documented history as a dye plant. That history belongs to that species and is not transferable to this one.

Native range

Native across 30 US states + 2 CA provinces.

Worldwide native range.

AHS heat range

1-11

Native ecoregions

Naturally belongs in 21 ecoregions - its native range crosses a state or province each one spans (not necessarily this exact habitat).

Appalachian mixed mesophytic forests

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Appalachian-Blue Ridge forests

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Arizona Mountains forests

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Atlantic coastal pine barrens

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Central Tallgrass prairie

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Chihuahuan desert

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Colorado Rockies forests

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Cross-Timbers savanna-woodland

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Eastern Canadian Forest-Boreal transition

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Eastern Great Lakes lowland forests

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Climate notes

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Missouri Botanical Garden describes the native habitat as prairies, glades, open woods, thickets, roadsides and open ground, and puts the native range in the southeastern United States from Florida to Texas and New Mexico north to Georgia, Missouri and Kansas. The Wildflower Center gives the habitat as open sandy woods, roadsides and fields. Provenance of the mapped WGSRPD range needs stating plainly: the POWO taxon page returned HTTP 403 to automated retrieval, as it did for most of this wave, so the botanical-country rows here were taken from World Checklist of Vascular Plants data served through GBIF - the same Kew dataset reached by another route - and POWO is cited as the authority because that is where the data originates.

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The two range layers on this record disagree with the horticultural source, and the disagreement is the most useful thing on the page rather than a defect to smooth over. The Kew rows carry 33 botanical countries and the Wildflower Center per-state list carries 32, and they differ by exactly one entry, New York, which Kew maps and the Wildflower Center does not. Both layers therefore treat Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, Ontario and Quebec as native. Missouri Botanical Garden says the opposite in prose: through introduction and garden escapes this coreopsis has become established in the eastern and central United States well north of its native range. Read the map as the current distribution recognised by the botanical checklists and read the MBG sentence as how much of it got there. A gardener in New England is almost certainly growing a naturalised plant, not a local one.

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Zone 4 to 9 by Missouri Botanical Garden, which is a wide band for a plant of the southern prairies and glades and is one reason it turns up so far north of where it started. The Wildflower Center records the USDA native status as native to the lower 48 states and introduced in Canada, which is worth pairing with the note above about the northern half of the mapped range.

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Drainage is the site test, not rainfall. Missouri Botanical Garden calls it easily grown in dry to medium moisture, well-drained soil, says it thrives in poor, sandy or rocky soils with good drainage, lists Drought, Dry Soil and Shallow-Rocky Soil among its tolerances, and names crown rot in moist, poorly drained soils as the thing that kills it. A hot gravelly strip suits it and a well-watered loam border shortens its already short life.

•

It is tolerant of heat, humidity and drought by Missouri Botanical Garden, which is an unusual combination to have stated outright and is the practical case for using it in the humid Southeast where many yellow daisies mildew and collapse. Its own foliar diseases are the counterweight: powdery mildew, leaf spot and rust are all listed, and all three are diseases of crowded, shaded, still plantings rather than of heat itself.

•

Persistence is the honest caveat and it is climate-independent. Missouri Botanical Garden calls the plants somewhat short-lived, says freely self seeds and can become somewhat weedy, and notes that self-seeding helps perpetuate a good planting; the Wildflower Center states that the plant is not reliably perennial and self-sows readily, becoming weedy. Where seeding is welcome the stand renews itself indefinitely from volunteers. Where it is not, expect to divide every 2 to 3 years or to replace the plants, and note that Missouri Botanical Garden lists Annual among its suggested uses for exactly this reason.

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Rabbit and deer are both listed among its tolerances by Missouri Botanical Garden, which is a meaningful argument for it on unfenced rural ground where most yellow composites of this size are browsed.

Similar plants

Browse lateral options with similar roles, light needs, size, or native-range overlap; these are not filtered for a better climate fit.

Rudbeckia hirta

Black-eyed Susan

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.

A native upright perennial with fragrant midsummer flower panicles in pink, white, lavender, or red - a classic border anchor and hummingbird-friendly choice for sunny beds.

A tough, bright perennial for sunny borders, pollinator patches, and late-summer color.

A drought-tolerant native perennial of the central and eastern United States with long summer bloom, strong pollinator value, and winter seedheads for birds.

A fragrant native perennial with red summer flowers that draw hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies.

Short-toothed mountain mint

A clump-forming aromatic native perennial of eastern North America, grown as much for its silvery floral bracts as its bloom - the upper leaves below each flower head turn a frosted, dusty-mint color in summer. Dense flat-topped clusters of tiny two-lipped pinkish-white flowers cover the plant from mid to late summer and are a magnet for bees and butterflies. Unlike the true mints (Mentha), it spreads only modestly by rhizome and is not invasive.

Perennial

Full sun / Part sun / Part shade

Educator packet

Plant packet

Largeflower tickseed educator packet

Scientific name

Coreopsis grandiflora

Plant type

perennial

Hardiness

4a-9b

Light

full-sun, part-sun

Moisture

low

Spacing

18 inches

Classroom prompts

- Which plant traits are observations, and which are care recommendations?

- How would this plant fit change if the garden location moved warmer, colder, wetter, or drier?

- Which source-backed facts would you cite in a lesson handout?

Use the Sources & citations section below for page citation styles and the field-level source list.

Sources & citations

Cite this page

For lesson plans, articles, or research that uses this page. Use the source cards below to explore the references that informed this record.

Plotwright. (2026, May 17). Largeflower tickseed (Coreopsis grandiflora). Retrieved 2026, August 20, from https://plotwright.com/plants/coreopsis-grandiflora

Sources used for this record

This record is compiled from the sources below.

Missouri Botanical Garden PlantFinder

Botanical research database

Open source

Source guide

Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Native Plant Database

Botanical research database

Open source

Source guide

USDA PLANTS Database

Government data source