Plant of the month, Wine cup

The common name purple poppy mallow is more widely used but since it is neither a poppy nor a mallow I prefer the name wine cup since it is more descriptive. The deep wine magenta color of the bloom is a nice contrast to the many yellows of early summer. Wine cup has a delicate one inch flower head and blooms May through August. This species prefers full sun and dry to average garden soil. One of the neat things about wine cup are the seeds, be sure to look for them after the bloom. The seeds are arranged in a wheel of little wedges like a cheese cake. When the seeds are brown and fall off the plant easily into your hand they are ready to collect.

Wine cup stems are trailing and look great hanging over a rock wall. Wine cup is commonly used as a low ground cover since the stems lay across the ground. The stems do not root so no need to worry about aggressive spreading. Ground cover plantings are not dense enough to choke out weeds and the fragile stems can sometimes be challenging to weed around. In the wild, wine cup uses other neighboring plants to support its floppy stems. Mixing in with a savanna or prairie planting wine cup flowers will pop up here and there between other plants.

There are three species of wine cup that you might run into in a native plant landscape. They have slightly different growth habits and bloom times. However, most garden centers will only have one species available to choose from.

Callirhoe involucrata, purple poppy-mallow

Callirhoe digitata, fringed poppy mallow Callirhoe bushii, Bush's poppy mallow

I have a soft spot for Bush's poppy mallow since I did some research on conservation of this threatened plant in college. Whenever using rare plants in your landscape be sure that they come from a reliable source and have not been collected from a wild population. Plants and seeds collected from the wild can threaten wild populations. Digging up wild plants disturbs the soil, harming neighboring plants and adding empty space where weeds can come in and invade. Collecting seeds from the wild can harm a population by decreasing the number of new individuals and removing genetic diversity.