Blue, Coral, Purple & Red Porterweed

Porterweed is a plant that I've loved for years. I sort of have a collection of them. They are fast growers, they are super easy to grow and they bounce back in no time after a hard pruning. I usually give mine a hard pruning every winter just to keep them under control. They come back as a fuller bush and they bloom more profusely after a good pruning. These are definitely drought-tolerant and butterfly & bee attracting plants.

Blue porterweed (Stachytarpheta jamaicensis) blooms almost all year here in east central Florida's Zone 9b. It reseeds freely and I'm always pulling up babies and planting them where I think they should be. The seeds grow in the tall tails after the flowers drop off. Once they are dry, you can cut the tails and harvest the seeds by holding the tail over a paper towel and tapping it... the seeds will fall out. I've never tried growing this one from cuttings because the babies appear so frequently. Some call it invasive but I haven't found that to be the case in my garden. Butterflies and bees favor this one to the other colors, probably because it is a native plant rather than an exotic like the other colors. The Long-Tailed Skipper butterflies especially enjoy it.

The leaves on the native Blue porterweed are very different from the leaves on the exotic porterweeds that bloom in other colors. The flowers on Blue porterweed are actually a purplish-blue color but they cannot be mistaken for Purple porterweed.

Exotic porterweeds don't reseed like the Blue native ones do. However, the exotic ones are very easy to grow from cuttings. These cuttings (seen below) have barely rooted and are already blooming.

To take these cuttings, all I did was cut a couple of branches and stick them in a pot of soil. I put the pot of cuttings in a spot where they got filtered sun and made sure they were watered regularly. That's all there was to it.

Now this is where I'm a bit confused. This is my Coral porterweed with a Gulf Fritillary butterfly sipping its nectar.

And another picture of Coral porterweed.

And this is my latest addition, Red porterweed.

While the pictures don't show much difference in the color of the flowers, in actuality, the difference is very noticeable. I'm not sure if Coral or Red porterweed is Stachytarpheta mutabilis as I've seen it described as both Red and Coral. And I'm not sure what the other one is. Not that it really matters, I think they are all beautiful and I hope my new Red one thrives and grows as well as the others have.