Name that plant!

[HamFrancisco]

Can anyone identify the yellow airy perennial plant just to left of centre? I like this overall effect but don't know what the yellow one is. Thanks!

Could be a yellow Scabious or Yarrow.

I didn't know you could get yellow scabious, but now that I do I really want some!! I tihnk it's really hard to tell what the yellow flowers are from that distance but they look medium height and daisyish to me.

Is it a yellow geum?

Yellow scabious, they do grow larger than the blue or white one. I have some at the back of my border. I take a clump with me when I move.

Yellow scabious

Thanks! I'm trying to up the amount of native plants I have in the garden, would that count?

There is a wild scabious, so the cultivar would be considered as native, The bees love it.
Have you planted any cranesbill geraniums and Persicaria? They also are wild flowers with cultivated varieties.

I've got Welsh poppies that fill a similar space to geraniums. I was considering persicaria or sanguisorba. I also have thrift and valerian. Sea holly is native, isn't it? It's a small garden so I'm trying not to go beserk with varieties but I want to do my bit for native planting.

If you’ve got a wall or fence, then Honeysuckle would be lovely.

Oh yes, I have a lonicera periclymemum (sp?) which I think is the native one. It’s lovely.

Yes, wild hedgerow honeysuckle has the best fragrance. If you’ve got a shady spot Lilly of the Valley would also be lovely.

Scabiosa ochroleuca is more frequently listed as Scabiosa columbaria ssp ochroleuca, which would mean it's a subspecies of the native Small Scabious S. columbaria. But Stace does not list the subspecies, which suggests it's not found in the wild in the UK. So no, you can't add it to your total. If you could accept a colour change to pinky blue, you'd have a choice between Knautia arvensis, Field Scabious, S columbaria Small scabious, or S succisa Devils-bit Scabious.

It's not a cultivar, it's a subspecies, and the subspecies doesn't appear to grow in the wild in the UK, it's mainland Europe towards the Middle East.

Sea holly Eryngium maritimum is native but most of the Eryngiums for sale are not native.

Lily of the Valley grows wild in the UK.

If you are looking for attractive native plants, how about purple toadflax linaria purpurea? They can grow up to nearly a metre tall. Garden centres sometimes sell a pink variety 'Canon Went', which is shorter. They are a relatively short-lived perennial, but self-seed happily, and are not too invasive. we moved here 30+ years ago and still have them popping up here and there, descended from the couple that were in the garden then.

I agree purple toadflax are lovely, especially when they self seed in unexpected places. Mine have colonised three pots of bamboo and look lovely bringing some colour in to the lower levels. Nature sometimes plans things better than we do.

If you are looking for attractive native plants, how about purple toadflax linaria purpurea? Not a native, though. Neophyte (introduced after 1500).

Purple toadflax grows wild in a few places round here, as does the yellow one. Bees particularly love it.

Anyway, how long does something have to be here before considered native? If it has been here for many hundreds of years and is good for bees, what's not to like? When you think about it, every single species 'native' to Britain has arrived here by one means or another in the last 11,000 years since the end of the last ice age.

Yes, it's a bit of a minefield, the native thing, isn't it? I've been a bit galvanised by the survey results on the news the other day about non-natives outnumbering natives for the first time ever.
I'm making a new garden and I'm dithering about EVERYTHING. 😁

Native = arrived naturally, from another area where it was native, opposite of alien = introduced deliberately or accidentally by human activity. Difficult to be sure how something arrived when it was a long time ago, so instead people distinguish between archeophyte, here before 1500, and neophyte, arrived more recently.

Linaria purpurea was introduced as a garden plant from Italy and escaped into the wild.

I'm glad I have them in my garden though. They have propagated themselves over the last 35+ years, and occasionally we get pink ones as well as purple. The bees really enjoy them and we also get the caterpillars from the Toadflax Brocade Moth. That is apparently a fairly recent arrival since the 1950's and is uncommon.

They’re one of these things that aren’t “native” in the sense of archeophyte, which is I reckon what most people think of as native, but which nobody deliberately sets out to grow. I think Yellow Corydalis and Red Valerian are probably in the same bracket. All of them well worth keeping.

If you want yellow flowered perennials that are drought tolerant, I've found these to be very good, not rikishi native though

hayloft.co.uk/product/phlomis-russeliana/yp114d20