The Garden Guy used to drive Mississippi’s Highway 49 from Hattiesburg to Gulfport to fall in love with the native Stokes aster. They aren’t just native to Mississippi but found throughout the South.

The blooms are large, reaching 3 to 4 inches wide and almost as exotic looking as those of the passionflower. Stokes’ asters have always been among my favorite native perennials though I have ...

As I wander the grounds of the arboretum throughout the month of May, my eye is caught by the blue flowers of the late spring-blooming plant commonly known as Stokes aster. Closely related to its ...

Stokes aster is a long-lived, low-growing perennial that flaunts remarkably frilly flowers for butterflies throughout spring, into summer and again in autumn. This native species (Stokesia laevis) ...

A clump-forming perennial with a basal rosette of foliage growing to 18 inches tall and wide. The flowers are produced on stems reaching well above the foliage that bear leaf-like appendages. The ...

Stokes’ asters have always been among my favorite native perennials, although I have typically only grown them in small drifts of five to seven plants. Now at the Columbus Botanical Garden I’ve got ...

Tell me about Stokes’ aster, please. I remember my grandmother planting seeds and having the most wonderful mounds of blue flowers all summer. Now that I have my own house, I’d like to have them, too.

When I drove out of Alabama for North Carolina 35 years ago, all I could see behind me were gaunt pines and dry, dull cotton fields, disappearing in the dust of my truck. What a relief, when I got to ...

Q: Could you help me identify this flower and tell me about the plant? I took this photo in my mother's garden in NC and think that it is stokesia, but am not positive. I am entering the photo into a ...