Cannas: The Plant With Multiple Personalities

It’s a plant with multiple personalities. Some grow it for its dramatic and exotic foliage while others grow it for its height and long-lasting colorful flowers. It laughs at the dog days of August when it’s perfectly happy. It’s well suited to being grown in large pots, but just as happy in a garden bed.

As a child I remember a long garden bed maybe 100 feet long and 3 feet wide along the private drive that led to the house. The bed was filled with these plants for a number of summers. Late every spring my father would go down the coldest part of the basement and retrieve a few plastic bags filled with these wondrous roots (well, to be technically correct, tubers) that he’d plant when the soil was warm. Late in the summer this long border along the drive would be thick with 5- and 6-foot-tall Canna plants that sported 2-foot-long banana leaves of greens and reds with spikes of flowers in pink, red, yellow and orange.

As I got older I began to dread these plants because my work came at the end of the season when some gardeners learn to fear (or ignore) the wonderful Canna. After the first frost, the foliage crisps and withers within hours, and that’s the sign that it’s time to get out the garden fork and dig. This is a tender plant, and if the tubers are not stored indoors they rapidly turn to mush in the soil.

Easy enough you say? Well, you need a strong back and a sturdy garden fork to dig the tuberous roots that can weigh several pounds if the plants have been growing well during the summer. Then, once dug, the roots are air dried, making sure that each clump has several “eyes.” Once dried they can be packed in peat moss, put in plastic bags (with holes) or crates stored in a cool, dry spot (cool not freezing) until next year.

The problems arise from the fact that each healthy plant can produce enough new tuber growth for two to four new divisions come spring, so you give them to friends, who give them to friends and soon the whole neighborhood hates you for growing a couple of Cannas ’cause no one wants any more. The more exotic (and more expensive) varieties are not as prolific.

But they are wonderful flora that have a place as specimen plants, as foliage accents or for their flowers. Available as dwarfs that are only a few feet tall and as 6-to-7-foot-tall giants, they are one of the few large plants that flower late in the summer and sometimes into early fall. Many gardeners are planting them indoors now in pots and then when the soil is warm they replant them outdoors, thus forcing earlier blooms.

Native to the swamps and wetlands of South Carolina and Florida, where they are hardy, Cannas were brought to Europe in the 1600s, where they were crossed with other species found in South and Central America. For more than two centuries they were cultured but looked nothing like the plants that we grow now. It was in the 1850s that some really fancy hybridizing was done in France, and in 1893 the plants were featured at the Great Exposition in Paris and also in the World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago, where they were displayed in 76 beds that extended more than 1,000 feet long.

Several years after these two great shows the Canna fell out of favor even though Wilhelm Pfitzer was introducing new varieties. It was these Pfitzer hybrids that became the rage again in the 1950s, and those were the ones that I was relegated to dig and divide. They became popular again in the mid-1970s with the introduction of several dwarf varieties, but again faded from favor as hobby breeders and some pros stayed hard at work developing flowers in all colors except blue, purple and green. Even the foliage has gone through changes and now there are varieties with stripes of yellow and white and even variegations. In fact, there are now several varieties where the plants are grown solely for their foliage, and the flowers are insignificant and removed when they appear.

Another breakthrough are Cannas that can be grown from seed. The seed (available in a number of mail-order catalogs) is planted indoors in late winter and the plants flower in the garden that summer. This kind of solves the problem of what to do with excess tubers since you can simply reseed every year, but the seed-grown plants lack in size and interest and are just a tease of the hybrids grown from roots. It has to be noted that the seed-grown varieties aren’t nearly as spectacular as the ones grown from tubers.

Not coincidentally, 1993 was the 100th anniversary of the 1893 expositions that really introduced the Cannas to the gardening public, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden celebrated with a special festival that is repeated to a smaller degree every August. The display can include more than 100 varieties in 11 different beds in a rainbow of colors and a wide range of sizes that are interplanted with other Victorian classics.

If you do catch the Canna bug, remember that these plants are not only spectacular to see, but very easy to grow so long as you remember that they are lovers of heat and sun. There was always a wonderful display in Hampton Bays along Montauk Highway where the bay is on the south side and the Canna display on the north side of the highway near South Valley Road.

To get the best show, some gardeners start a number of the tubers indoors at about the time that tomato seeds are started and to get them going they need a warm spot to stimulate the tubers to sprout and grow. They prefer a soil temperature of 70 degrees and require very little water until foliage appears. They shouldn’t be planted outside until the soil is nice and warm; cold and wet soil will only lead to rot. If you plant prestarted plants and tubers at the same time, you’ll have an extended period of bloom that will run from early August well into late September or later if it’s a mild fall.

The roots are available at some garden centers but by the time they’re available it’s too late to get them started indoors. Many gardeners get their tubers from friends or from mail-order catalogs. The Horn Canna Farm (cannas.net) may have the largest selection with 34 dwarf varieties, 19 medium sized, eight tall and five giant types. You can also find a good and reasonably priced selection at dutchbulbs.com but as of this writing nearly half the varieties were sold out. Local garden centers may also be able to find you some unusual varieties and some will have potted plants ready to plant in early summer.

The plants are virtually insect and disease free, and once you get the knack of winter storage you’ll have stock for a lifetime. Keep growing.