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My gardening hot take is that you should stop planting zinnias—everyone’s garden darling—and plant coneflower instead. While I love zinnias as much as anyone (and have spent years and plenty of money on expensive mixes and varieties), I don’t love growing them from seed, planting them, and pruning them, just to watch them die at the end of the season—and do it all over again next year. I skipped zinnia-palooza this year, and thought I would be crushed by their absence in the July and August garden, but as it happens, the echinacea and rudbeckia (two forms of coneflower) I’d planted in droves over the last two years finally came into its own and filled the space with similar looking blooms.
Annual zinnias vs. perennial coneflowers
Zinnias are annuals, but coneflowers are perennial and self-seeding. Not only will they come back year to year, but they might sprout some offspring too. As I get older, the overwhelming amount of work that goes into growing, planting, and maintaining annuals is becoming less attractive. The downsides of perennials are often the price: Buying a perennial start is likely to be four to five times more expensive than a six-pack of annuals. But now is the perfect time of year to buck up and grow them on your own from seed or cutting and get them in the ground before fall, so next year you’ll have a nice, respectable plant. And in two years, it will explode with color.
That said, there are a lot of new varieties you can only get as starts, not seeds. Still, I say they’re worth it for the variety, when you consider the longevity of the plant versus planting zinnias year after year. Bluestone Perennials knock it out of the park with the diversity of color and shape in their coneflowers. You could plant an entire ombre from pink to green.
How to achieve the same color and shape as zinnias with perennials
The reason people adore zinnias is the endless range of colors and shapes they come in. Whether varieties like Thumbelina that tend to stay within a foot or two of the ground, or Benary’s Giants that crawl to four feet tall, there are endless shapes and faces to zinnias. Coneflowers are having a moment, and there is an endless variety of options out there with different colors and faces. I’d even go so far as to say some of the echinacea options are more interesting than zinnias, while maintaining the same type of flower shape. Here are some of my favorites:
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Cheyenne Spirit: A mix of orange, yellows and reds, I’d grow multiple plants so you get a whole range.
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Double Decker: Many of the double-blooming coneflowers can only be found as starts, but this pink version will delight people who see it in the garden, and it can be grown from seed.
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Green Twister: Green blooms are rare, and this ombre flower goes from lime to pink in a way that is incredibly pleasing to the eye.
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Double Golden Gloriosa: This is probably the closest you’ll get to a cactus zinnia in a coneflower.
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Echinacea Puff Vanilla: One of a crop of new double-blooming coneflowers from Bluestone Perennials, this cream-colored puffball dream is going in my garden pronto.
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Echinacea Lemon Drop: I am besotted with this soft yellow double blooming echinacea that is top heavy, making it like a sun blasting off into the sky.
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Echinacea Sunseekers Rainbow: Like a small, less upright sunflower, this vibrant electric orange coneflower is a showstopper. I can’t stop looking at it.
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Double Scoop Raspberry: This is still a double-blooming coneflower, but it has more delicate top blooms, in a raspberry sherbert color.
