rose campion
dusty miller
silene coronaria latin

Ginger lily, rose campion, Louisiana irises, the yellow ones.

That velvety little plant, now 18 inches high and 2 feet across, is rose campion or lychnis coronarius.

Rose Campion Q. I'm enclosing a photograph of a plant I love.

Rose campion or pink mullein (Lychnis coronaria) blooms in June.

Perennials to consider include lavender, butterfly weed, coreopsis, campanula, delphinium and rose campion.

If this simple idea solves the problem of what to do with rose campion, beyond exterminating it, it should solve other lesser problems even more handily.

The light gray leaves of rose campion (Lychnis coronarius) are smooth and velvety, not downy, but they are still pleasant to touch.

Silene coronaria (Rose Campion)

Yarrow, cranesbill, goldenrod, globe thistle, rose campion and Michaelmas daisies are usually in the birds' top ten of herbaceous plants.

Deer also turn up their noses at Lychnis coronaria, or rose campion, which is a beauty of a tall weed, with deep orange flowers that look like sunbursts.

(Full disclosure: I love rose campion's ghostly twin, L. coronaria alba, which floats on its Tinkertoy architecture all over my white garden.)

Common names include rose campion, dusty miller (this also refers to Centaurea cineraria and Jacobaea maritima), mullein-pink and bloody William.

Rose campion, a bold shade of magenta, has been a troublemaker everywhere I have placed it, especially the year it ended up next to a vermilion tea rose named Cary Grant.

In my ornamental borders, I have found slugs are not partial to the felty leaf texture on plants like lambs' ears (Stachys species), artemisias and rose campion (Lychnis coronaria).

But in this case there's no mistaking old-fashioned rose campion, Lychnis coronaria, which has been a staple of dooryard gardens for centuries in spite of its straggly habits and neon magenta flowers.

Though the flowers are small and widely separated, rose campion keeps putting out new ones (albeit fewer and fewer of them) for six to eight weeks after the initial burst of blossom in early July.

Gillian Aldrich started growing vegetables in her backyard three years ago, and she's now working on planting a bed of hydrangeas, butterfly bushes, rose campion, and her favorite pale-pink hardy geraniums along one side of her property.

Summer and fall-blooming perennials include black-eyed susan, coreopsis, lamb's ears, lily, bee balm, mountain bluet, rose campion, mallow, Shasta daisy, artemisia, yarrow, boltonia, Japanese anemone, New York aster and sedum.

Even the handsome gray-leaved dusty millers have done extremely well.

Until you consider how many Yellow Boy and Queen Sophie marigolds, blue ageratums and dusty millers it takes (about 2,000) just to make that parterre bloom.

They are not the two dusty millers in the white mill down by the river, where the great water-wheel goes heavily round and round, like the monotonous days and nights in this forgotten place.

Those of you who like to grow the charming spring bulb Chionodoxa luciliae will find that you are now growing Scilla luciliae, and your Lychnis coronaria needs a new label, too: it's now Silene coronaria.