Red Valerian Snowcloud White

This popular Mediterranean plant represents an absolutely perfect choice for the hot and dry spots in your garden, where other perennials would quickly wilt. Plant the Red valerian seedling exclusively in full sun in poor, well-draining, and ideally sandy or loamy soil. Heavy and clay soils that retain moisture are not suitable for it at all, because the root system easily succumbs to rot in them. To achieve the best visual effect in the garden bed, we recommend group planting. Plant roughly 5 to 7 seedlings per square meter at the recommended spacing of 45 cm. The perennial will quickly form dense clumps 50 to 100 cm tall, which retain an airy habit even in adulthood and stand firmly without any artificial support.
Since Red valerian is naturally fully adapted to a lack of moisture, it will save you a lot of work with a watering can. Once you water the delivered seedling well after placing it in the bed and let it root firmly, it mostly doesn't need any further artificial watering for the rest of the season. You can also completely skip any fertilizing. Practical experience shows that in poorer conditions the perennial grows more compactly, forms sturdier stems, and above all blooms much more abundantly. If you are not building a classic garden bed, Red valerian can also be very successfully grown in a spacious pot on a sunny terrace. It is essential in such a case to use a heavily lightened substrate with a large proportion of sand and to ensure perfect water drainage out of the container.
From spring until the first days of autumn, you can enjoy a flood of pure white flowers that act in the garden as a reliable magnet for bees, butterflies, and other beneficial insects. To keep Red valerian in the best possible condition, it is highly recommended to continuously remove all faded shoots. This simple cutback will prevent unwanted seed formation, and thanks to this, the plant will put all its energy into setting new flowers. Otherwise, Red valerian very willingly self-seeds into the surroundings. By leaving the last few autumn flower heads, however, you can cleverly ensure the natural renewal of the stand, since the original mother plant usually lasts only a few years on the site.
This is an exceptionally hardy species that is completely free of pests and diseases in our conditions. With the arrival of winter, it is therefore not necessary to specially cover healthy seedlings with evergreen branches or mulch them heavily. Red valerian is highly frost-resistant and easily handles even severe frosts dropping to -23 °C. Its trouble-free survival during the winter months basically depends only on the quality of the soil drainage. Dry walls, sunny rockeries, or gentle slopes will guarantee it absolutely ideal conditions, because the terrain there keeps the delicate root collar dry even during persistent rains or sudden snowmelts.