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Canna Lilies Useful to Add Color and Mass to Your Garden

Making It Grow Minute

  Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. Canna lilies are useful for adding color and mass to sunny parts of southern gardens. They come in a variety of heights – the Canna musaefolia or banana canna can grow fifteen feet while the more refined Pfitzer series tops out at about two feet but has remarkably colorful flowers. All cannas respond to water, and they originally grew on shorelines or boggy areas. They prefer full sun and love an organically-rich soil with a low pH. The showy parts of their flowers are highly-modified stamen structures called stamenoids. Although butterflies visit day flowering cannas and hawkmoths collect nectar from the cannas that flower at night, they are self-pollinating and produce a hard, dark seed that is why one common name for canna is India shot. Cannas are most closely related to the lovely and fairly easy to grow indoors Prayer Plant of the family – Marantaceae.

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Amanda McNulty is a Clemson University Extension Horticulture agent and the host of South Carolina ETV’s Making It Grow! gardening program. She studied horticulture at Clemson University as a non-traditional student. “I’m so fortunate that my early attempts at getting a degree got side tracked as I’m a lot better at getting dirty in the garden than practicing diplomacy!” McNulty also studied at South Carolina State University and earned a graduate degree in teaching there.