What's your must have nectar plant?

I'm getting restless waiting for spring to bring back flowers, butterflies and hummers.
While I'm doing my fall clean up I'm planning what and where to plant next year.

I have lots of Butterfly Bushes and Lantana, and I always seed lots of Zinnia and Salvia. Sure bets in my garden. Every year I also try some new plants hoping to find some good nectar plants.

The two best new ones last year was Fire Spike, Odentonema strictum. It has bright red tubular flowers in late summer and fall and I expected the hummers to like it, which they did. But it also brought Giant Sulfurs by the hundreds. It looked like butter flying around it.

The other one was a Blue Porterweed, Stachytarpheta urticifolia. It is a bit different from the regular Blue Porterweed, It had small blue flowers with a white eye, but not quite the same "rat tail" the other one has. It brought a lot of smaller butterflies.

What was your best old or new plant last summer?

Red Porterweed and Lantana (which is a pest in Florida) These 2 have activity when nothing else does. Zebra Longwings, Swallowtails and Gulf Fritillary. Oh yeah..and my neighbor's Passiflora incarnata for the Zebra Longwings. And the Asclepias for the Monarchs. And then there's the weed, Spanish Needles, Bidens pilosa (or B alba depending on what book you look at) it brings in lots of pollinators, all types of bees and Skipper butterflies. Then there's all the salvia and native asters...LOL!

My cassias bring lots of those pretty yellow ones and the playgroundus toyus too!

The cassias are marvelous for solitary bees and all the Sulphers! P toyus likes the cassias?? I must plant more in the spring!

I have 2 Cassias corymbosa in pots that I couldn't decide where to plant, and seeds for Cassia alata. They will be host plants for the Sulfurs. I hope I don't get too many P toyus, it looks like they could strip a plant in no time. I'm going to concentrate more on host plants next season. I have seeds of Milkweed, Pipevine, and Passion vine for that purpose.

Red Porterweed sounds interesting, I will look for that. Asters is also a good one, I didn't have enough flowers in the late fall.

You should be able to find them at Home Depot, etc this spring. $3 for a gallon size last spring. It's a real leggy plant like the purple. Mine is out in the middle of the yard...a high wind blew them over towards their sides and I've not been able to correct that yet, so possibly a slightly more protected area...You'll love it tho, it has been blooming nonstop and is putting out new buds now. Seems to me they stop blooming for a short time in January or February

Red porterweed is a bigger draw than the blue porterweed. My other favorite is pentas. Only problem with both of these is that they are cold sensitive. Pentas will be annuals in your neck of the woods. You would probably have to mulch the red porter heavily to keep it alive. My red porters have dropped all their leaves and it hasn't even gotten to freezing that I know of (I was gone for a week and it did get a bit chilly while we were gone). The blue ones are still full of leaves and doing just fine, though I don't think they are blooming. They should all come back in Feb.

Here's a picture of Red Porterweed at its best. This is a not so hot picture from the end of July. I'll post another that shows the lovely flower

Isn't that pretty? The color is very true in this picture

Well the swallowtails loved our golden dewdrops (duranta repens) and also our hummers went crazy over our bottlebrush (seems like for some reason they were attracted to the tree form more than the shrub?!?!)

Katrina