Canna
Canna lily
CANACEAE, The Canna family
Browsing in the mecca for cooks and gardeners, Powell’s Books for Home and Garden, I saw many images of tropical influenced gardens that had splashy, stripy cannas in abundance. They are marginally hardy here. If they have good drainage and a thick mulch they can winter over in the ground, but cannot be allowed to freeze. To be on the safe side, move pots into a garage or basement, and dig the fleshy rhizomes and store them in a cool, dark place.
Some popular varieties are ‘Red Velvet’, with purple leaves and ‘Tropicanna’ with yellow striped leaves and yellow and orange striped flowers. There are also a type called banana leaf cannas, that strongly resemble Musa. Most grow 4 to 6 feet tall, but some varieties are more compact.
While cannas are in vogue now, it’s not the first time. The Minnesota state fair relies heavily on them to decorate the grounds of their giant end of summer extravaganza, which tells you they must be a throwback to an earlier era. One summer I worked at the state fair greenhouses, that grow all the bedding plants, ornamental peppers and ferns that adorn the exhibition halls and line the streets. It seemed as though it had all been done the same way for 40 years, though recently new blood has been brought in to change things up. I hope they don’t ever do away with the living sculptures around the horticulture building though: large wire forms covered in a mosaic of hen and chicks and tiny carpet plants.
The cannas lined the entrances and were planted en mass in beds dotting the grounds. In February or March the dormant rhizomes would be potted up in terra cotta. After the last frost of spring, they were set out in beds with plenty of fertilizer. Once they started blooming they had to be deadheaded. After the fair, once they got hit by a light frost, they would be cut back to the ground, dug up and stored for another year.
