Helenium 'Mardi Gras'

🎉It's time to party!🎉 

Plant Helenium 'Mardi Gras' for a spectacular multicolored festival in the garden! Jazz up your beds with flowers filled with extravagantly decorated yellow, orange, and red petals surrounding rounded, deep brown cones on sturdy, low maintenance plants. Flowers up to 2" on tall stems attract many pollinators, and are excellent cut flowers.

These compact, clumping perennials have long bloom times once established, up to 6-8 weeks. Plant them in masses and drifts for a riot of color! Use them in containers for colorful accent plants. 

Ideal for Butterfly Gardens, Cottage Gardens, Cutting Gardens, Native Gardens, Moist Wildflower Meadows, Pollinator Gardens, Rain Gardens, and more!

🦋Attracts butterflies and bees. We have this planted in our Pollinator Garden!

🦌Herbivore resistant! Deer and rabbits tend to avoid these plants.

Deadhead to encourage reblooming. They are adapted to low nutrient soils. 

Full sun. They prefer moist, well-draining soil and can handle wet soil.

36-40"T x 24-36"W

Zones 4-8, cold hardy down to -30F.

💚Plant Nerd: Heleniums are named in honor of Helen of Troy, athough modern scholars aren't certain why, since these plants are from North and South America and nowhere near the Mediterranean. They are in the Asteracea family.

Helenium 'Mardi Gras' is a mix between two unidentified Heleniums, discovered by Bob Brown, of Cotswold Garden Flowers, England in 1996. 

Heleniums have many common names, including Sneezeweed, which has nothing to do with allergies (a common assumption), and everything to do with an old practice of turning these plants into snuff. They were then used to induce sneezing, in order to dispel bad spirits. Be sure to share this fact at the next party you attend!

Plants that commonly cause allergies due to pollen tend to be wind-pollinated. They have small pollen grains, that are designed to be easily carried on the wind. Helenium is insect-pollinated, and has the larger, heavier pollen grains associated with insect-pollinated plants.

Other common names include Autumn Sneezeweed, Bitterweed, Dog-Tooth Daisy, False Sunflower, Helen's Flower. In Wisconsin, the Menominee Indians call Helenium plants "aiatci'a ni'tcîkûn," which means "sneezing spasmodically".

Helenium Mardi Gras (‘Helbro’) USPP#15124