By MIKE RALEY WPTF Weekend Gardener

I have grown to love lantana. I never really had anything against it. It’s just the fact I haven’t had a lot of sun areas in my landscape and lantana can take up a fair amount of room if it is happy. Most of North Carolina is hot throughout the summer and we certainly have drought periods. Lantana is made to order for these conditions.

Lantana is in the verbena family and is sometimes called “shrub verbena.” It comes in various sizes from 1 to 6 feet tall and 3 to 5 feet wide according to my friends at the Cooperative Extension Service. It loves full sun, moist, but well-drained soil to fully perform. Lantana grows particularly well in the piedmont and thrives on the coastal plain and coast of North Carolina. It is even salt tolerant.

There are several varieties of lantana sold in North Carolina. “Miss Huff” is by far the most popular. That cultivar is all I have ever planted. It is a perennial in much of North Carolina and has splendid flowers of an orange, yellow, pink mix. “Miss Huff actually comes from cuttings from a plant found in Athens, Georgia. “Ham and Eggs” is similar with dark pink and yellow bloom clusters that appear for many as plates of ham and eggs. It always makes me hungry to talk about this one. It is also a cultivar you should have success in perennializing. “Chapel Hill Yellow” and “Chapel Hill Gold” are also popular. They do not produce light blue flowers, but I’m sure someone is working on that. Neither are quite as hardy as “Miss Huff” or “Ham and Eggs”. There are varieties with white, lavender, red and other colors too. There are many new varieties that you may find in the spring and early summer at your local nursery. There is also a groundcover lantana known as lantana “Montevidensis” or trailing lantana. It can be used in a large container to trail over the side. It will also hold soil on a bank. This definitely needs full sun. You can find this in lavender, purple and white. This variety like the rest we have mentioned are root hardy in zone 8 areas.

Lantana, as noted in the title, is a pollinator magnet! Butterflies, bees of all kinds and hummingbirds love this plant, the bright colors and lots of nectar. Pollinators also enjoy the mild, sweet fragrance and long growing season of lantana. The leaves kind of have a herbal or pungent fragrance.

I don’t use a lot of fertilizer around my landscape, especially with blooming plants which are deterred from producing flowers if they receive a lot of nitrogen. The nitrogen will instead give you abundant green foliage instead. That is, if you don’t burn the plant with too much nitrogen. The Espoma’s products are well suited for shrubs and flowers with their low nitrogen analysis.

Most of the folks on the crew on the “Weekend Gardener” agree that you will be safer Prune lantana’s dead stems in the spring. As for the dead stems this plant produces, I usually wait until the new green foliage sprouts from the ground before I get rid of the stems. Erv Evans always recommended we consider the appearance of a perennial in the winter before we plant in a show place area in the landscape. For the same reason it is not a good idea to plant a deciduous shrub along the foundation of a house. It doesn’t look good in the winter. You may trim your lantana during the growing season to produce more blooms. Another reason to prune is to prevent seeding. Lantana is considered invasive in places like Florida and Hawaii. But I have never experienced this in my landscape, nor has anyone on the show mentioned this as a problem for North Carolina. The folks at NC State do say lantana leaves can be poisonous to animals and an irritant to human skin.

As for pests, I have never noticed any insect problems with my lantana. If you have a thriving garden you may also be lucky enough to have predators like ladybugs, dragonflies, lacewings, spiders and praying mantis to help control the “bad” bugs.

There you have lantana in a nutshell. I like them. No, I love them in a sunny landscape with pollinators flying all around. If lantana is in a full sun location, has plenty of room to grow and is not overfertilized, this plant will give years of pleasure.