Penstemon hirsutus, Hairy Beardtongue

One of the more challenging aspects of posting about this species is choosing which photos to include, they are so darn photogenic that they steal the show every June and I’ve taken more than a few photos of them over the last several years.

Perfectly tidy, clump forming and blooming for 3 to 4 weeks, they fit equally well into conventional flower gardens and into low wildflower meadows. Their foliage and seed heads remain tidy through the summer and their foliage turns brilliant red in late autumn.

They grow to between 1’ and 2’ tall and around 16” to 24” across, spreading very slowly out from that. They thrive in full sun or dappled shade and average to dry soils.

They will seed and pop up in open spaces but I haven’t found that they compete much with other plants so I either just enjoy them where they appear or move them to locations where they will have a bit more space. So far, the ones that I moved out to the meadow have been holding their own without too much assistance (i.e. removal of the surrounding grasses) from me.

Seed saving is simple with the pods holding the tiny seeds through the drying stage when they can be clipped and upended into a container, falling free of the pods without any extra coaxing. If you are in a hurry to collect them, or you want to make sure that they all end up in your collecting bag rather than scattered nearby, you can clip the seed stems as soon as they browning and beginning to open but you’ll need to let them finish drying indoors and then crush the pods to free all the seeds. If you leave the seed heads standing until the fall, they will usually still have quite a few seeds (I’d say around half full) which will shake out freely if you clip the stem and shake it into a bag. Given how abundantly this species is when it comes to growing seeds, the vast majority of the ones I gather each year are passed on to the Ottawa Wildflower Seed Library for packing and distributing through their free seed events.