Golden Acre Home & Garden Centre's Plant Library

Description:

This beautiful variety produces stunning gray-green foliage with cream edges; contrasting reddish-purple flowers open in succession over several months; deadhead to promote new blooms; terrific in containers or for edging sunny borders

Ornamental Features

Thunder and Lightning Scabious features airy hot pink button flowers with purple overtones at the ends of the stems from early summer to early fall. The flowers are excellent for cutting. Its narrow leaves remain grayish green in colour with distinctive creamy white edges throughout the season.

Landscape Attributes

Thunder and Lightning Scabious is an open herbaceous perennial with an upright spreading habit of growth. It brings an extremely fine and delicate texture to the garden composition and should be used to full effect.

This is a relatively low maintenance plant, and is best cleaned up in early spring before it resumes active growth for the season. It is a good choice for attracting butterflies to your yard. It has no significant negative characteristics.

Thunder and Lightning Scabious is recommended for the following landscape applications;

• Mass Planting
• Border Edging
• General Garden Use
• Container Planting

Planting & Growing

Thunder and Lightning Scabious will grow to be about 14 inches tall at maturity, with a spread of 20 inches. It tends to be leggy, with a typical clearance of 1 foot from the ground, and should be underplanted with lower-growing perennials. It grows at a fast rate, and under ideal conditions can be expected to live for approximately 3 years. As an herbaceous perennial, this plant will usually die back to the crown each winter, and will regrow from the base each spring. Be careful not to disturb the crown in late winter when it may not be readily seen!

This plant does best in full sun to partial shade. It prefers to grow in average to dry locations, and dislikes excessive moisture. It is considered to be drought-tolerant, and thus makes an ideal choice for a low-water garden or xeriscape application. It is not particular as to soil type or pH. It is somewhat tolerant of urban pollution. This is a selected variety of a species not originally from North America.

Thunder and Lightning Scabious is a fine choice for the garden, but it is also a good selection for planting in outdoor pots and containers. It is often used as a 'filler' in the 'spiller-thriller-filler' container combination, providing a mass of flowers against which the larger thriller plants stand out. Note that when growing plants in outdoor containers and baskets, they may require more frequent waterings than they would in the yard or garden. Be aware that in our climate, most plants cannot be expected to survive the winter if left in containers outdoors, and this plant is no exception. Contact our experts for more information on how to protect it over the winter months.