regnum-plantae:

Achillea millefolium ‘Desert Eve Terracotta’, Asteraceae

To conclude the triptych of flowers in the orange gradient I’ve been writing about in the past few months, my favourite cultivar of yarrow we had at the garden centre over the summer period follows Agastache ‘Apricot Sprite’ and Digitalis ‘Goldcrest’. This beautiful perennial is part of the recently introduced ‘Desert Eve’ series, valuable for its compact habit, long flowering season -which starts earlier than for most other cultivars of yarrow- and its excellent attractiveness to wildlife. Hoverflies and flies seem to particularly love it, possibly due to the less than agreeable scent the flowers emit, especially during very warm days -my colleagues at the checkout asked me to stop adding yarrow to a vase placed next to the till where I usually put any flowers whose stem happens to break during handling. The feathery foliage, however, is pleasantly fragrant aside from providing an excellent contrast to the flat flower heads.

Selected garden cultivars are generally not used as medicinal plants, so I use the white, wild counterpart of this showy yarrow to prepare an oil I use on my hands at work during winter, when they are constantly wet and frozen and start cracking badly.