Helenium Ruby Tuesday

Helenium 'Ruby Tuesday' is a hybrid variety of sneezeweed that brings the garden to life. This recent cultivar, compact and bushy, offers a myriad of scarlet daisies from August to October. Their ligulate petals of authentic ruby red surround a prominent, velvety mahogany centre, circled with yellow, creating a stunning bicolour effect. The branched and sturdy stems of this robust perennial provide an abundance of flowers for bouquets. Easy to grow in the sun and in moist soil, this generous plant brings the garden to life until the first frosts, in flower beds as well as in large pots.

The sneezeweeds are perennials of the Asteraceae family, native to North America, where they most often grow near marshes. The 'Ruby Tuesday' cultivar is a recent horticultural creation. It stands out for its compact habit and unique red colour, unmatched in its category. The plant is bushy, with branched stems reaching a height of 40 to 55cm (16 to 22in). The colourful leaves, a vibrant green, are lanceolate in shape with smooth margins, arranged alternately along the stems. From August to October, a large number of flowers, botanically called heads, tirelessly bloom at the top of the stems. These inflorescences resemble large daisies, 6 to 8cm (2 to 3in) in diameter. In the centre, the rounded and shiny cone, coloured mahogany, gradually gives way to yellow stamens arranged in concentric circles. Around the periphery, a collar of uniformly scarlet red florets unfolds. This almost unreasonable flowering announces with fanfare the start of autumn flowers and foliage.

A cottage garden without sneezeweeds is not complete. Helenium 'Ruby Tuesday' is an easy-to-grow and disease-free plant; it blooms just as well on slopes, in flower beds, and in containers on the terrace. Despite all these qualities, sneezeweeds remain rare in gardens. Perhaps because their warm tones announce autumn a bit too quickly, while the garden and the gardener are still trying to hold onto the last summer blooms; yet they are the ideal complement to asters. 'Ruby Tuesday', when combined with Rudbeckias, pairs very well with autumn plants such as Heucheras and sunflowers, but it can also be associated with a deciduous spindle tree, whose foliage ignites at the first frost, or with the sumptuous red dye vine. In a different setting, the velvety foliage of Stachys or salvias greatly enhances the warm hue of this flowering.