Container Gardening Plants: Guara

I love, love, love this plant! It’s unusual, stands up to the high prairie winds here in Minnesota, is heat and drought tolerant and is ever-blooming. And best yet, no need to dead head. What’s not to like about that?

The delicate tendrils keep shooting out flowers to ever higher heights giving the plant just that much more to wave in the wind. Deadheading this plant stunts flowering for a time. I don’t recommend it except at planting time if the plant is spindly. I tried it later in the season and regretted it.

Guara is a Texas native perennial that is grown as a specialty annual in colder climates. The plant is used to much harsher conditions than the summers in Minnesota. It has done very well the last few summers in the hot, dry weather. It may not fare as well in a cooler, wetter summer but as we haven’t had one in a while I can’t say for sure.

The growth habit is tall with delicate tendrils which continue to shoot outward as the season wears on. The plant runs the risk of looking spindly if not planted with good companion plants. Use spreading or mounding plants such as fiber optic grass, brachycome, trailing verbena, or petunias to give the planter a full look. These mounding plants also accentuate the delicate blooms of the guara as they appear to shoot out of the container like fireworks.

Guara comes in shades of pink ranging from bright fuchsia to almost white. Foliage colors range from bright green to dark variegated burgundy. In the variegated varieties the foliage is as gorgeous as the flowers and adds more sizzle to containers.

Plant a couple in of these ever blooming beauties in containers and watch your flowers dance all summer. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Growing Art: Container Garden Design of the Week

Prairie Beauty

Plants: Gaura (1), fiber optic grass (2), trailing verbena (2)

This is a great design for those windy spots in your yard. Guara looks like a delicate plant but don’t let its appearance fool you. This is a Texas native that also stands up to heat, drought and humidity. In windy areas, rather than get beat down or shredded, the delicate pink flowers dance in the wind, enhancing the beauty of the plant and adding interest in the garden.

Trailing verbena is a spreading plant rather than a true trailer and fills in the base of the guara nicely. I like to use purple as a strong contrast to the pink flowers. Lavender or pink trailing verbena would work well also depending on your color preferences.

In the corners, use fiber optic grass. This plant does double duty as filler and a trailing plant. I do recommend splitting this plant (2 plants for 4 corners) as it is a vigorous grower. In the picture you’ll notice the fiber optic grass is taking over. In fact the trailing verbena gets lost in all that grass and this picture is really a cautionary tale. This is what you don’t want. It will fill in quickly even if it looks sparse at first.



These plants can all take full sun and would do well in either a south or west exposure. I have had it on the east side of my house and it has done very well there as well.

Truly the best part of this arrangement is how well it stands up to wind. As long as the plants get at least 6 hours of sun, put this container in any windy spot in your yard where other plants get windblown. You’ll be amazed at the beauty of this container.

What Goes Where? How to Design a Container Garden

The hardest part of gardening is deciding what plants to use. What plants go together? What about color? With the vast array of choices, where do you begin? The whole process can be overwhelming.

As I’ve mentioned previously, the basic container design is Up, Out, Down. Another way to look at it is "thrillers" or the focal plant, "fillers", mounding or spreading plants and "spillers", trailing plants. Varying the heights, growing habits, color and leaf shape of the plants used is what gives the container interest and makes a successful planting. Of course, there are containers that work well with a single plant and can be stunning but when you do combinations you don’t want the plants competing with each other. For example, if all the plants are upright, the container will look empty at the soil level. Using all trailing or spreading plants will look flat. Mounding plants do work well in a pot but can be boring unless in a grouping.

Good choices for the thriller or focal plant are taller, upright plants such as coleus, grasses, and taller varieties of petunias, snapdragons, zinnias and marigolds. Fillers include alyssum, trailing verbena, some trailing petunias, oxalis and smaller varieties of petunias, snapdragons and marigolds. Good trailers are vinca vine, creeping jenny, calibrochoa, bacopa and sweet potato vine.

So where do you start? I always start with a plant I love, something that catches my eye or that I just have to have. This can be any sort of plant. Sometimes I start with the focal plant, sometimes with the filler. It doesn’t really matter but having a jumping off point, a plant or color you want to have, makes choosing companion plants a whole lot easier.

One of the plants I love is the Global Merlot ivy geranium. I’m not sure if it’s the color of the blooms or the name that I love more but when I saw it, I knew I had to have it. So what to put with it? An ivy geranium is what I call a spreader. Some will call it a trailing plant but its growth habit is more straight out, filling in the soil line nicely. In this case, I started with the filler so I now I needed a focal point and a trailer. I literally walked around the greenhouse, carrying my plant and holding it up to others to see how it looked. It’s not unlike putting an outfit together. I found a sun coleus with burgundy and lime green leaves. The burgundy played nicely off the deep red blooms of the geranium and the lime green edging led me to the Marguerite sweet potato vine. One plant leads to another. There is contrast in growth habit and leaf shape but everything ties together.

It may take time to find plants that work together. What seems like a good idea in the greenhouse may not look so great when it all gets growing but that’s part of the process and what I think is part of the fun of gardening. Starting with a plant that you love and a basic formula does make the process a lot easier and increases the chances of creating a successful container.