ALL PREORDER SPECIES ARE STILL GROWING IN OUR GREENHOUSE - Please note all orders containing preorder species will be held until all plants in your order are ready to pickup or ship. If you would like available plants sooner please make two separate orders.
Light
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Full, Partial
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Moisture
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Medium-Wet to Medium-Dry
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Bloom
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Late Summer
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Color
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Purple
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Height
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6 FT
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Great St. John’s wort is a widespread herbaceous perennial with subspecies native to North America, Europe, and Asia. Our North American subspecies, pyramidatum, tends to have slightly wider and more pointed foliage than the other subspecies, though this is variable. Great St. John’s wort is robust and easy to grow. It prefers full sun to part shade and tolerates a variety of moist, well-drained soils from sandy loam to clayey loam. It has a handsome, upright habit with five foot stems that are unbranched except near the top of the plant where the flowers form. The stems are clad in opposite pairs of smooth, lance-shaped leaves that reach up to five inches in length. The bright yellow blossoms appear in a sunny cluster at the top of the plant for two to three weeks in late summer.
The flowers are the largest among the North American St. John’s worts, reaching two inches across. They have five wavy-edged petals and four or five fused styles ringed with roughly 100 golden stamens. Although these flowers produce no nectar, their pollen is highly attractive to bumblebees as well as other groups of pollinators. Following pollination, the flowers give way to large, pyramidal seed capsules that start green and ripen into a dark brown. These attractive capsules persist throughout fall and winter, providing late season interest. Great St. John’s wort self-seeds but primarily spreads through rhizomes to form small colonies. This species works well as a rear border plant or in naturalized woodland margins and streambank settings.
