FLIMBY: Easy-care gazanias fill those hot corners

This is another installment in our Flowers in My Back Yard series, devoted to everything that blooms.

If gazanias didn't produce such nice flowers, they'd be considered a weed.

Also called treasure flowers, gazanias grow in any soil, need little water, love sunshine, and bloom brightly from spring to fall. They also reseed easily, and if not deadheaded quickly the unattractive seed heads hang around too long.

They are great, in other words, for those hot corners of the garden where little else seems to grow, and where their post-bloom looks are less important. They are perennials in our region, so don't have to be replaced unless we get (increasingly unlikely) severe winter frosts.

Gazanias are not native to California -- they originated in South Africa -- but have adapted to our climate easily. Introduced as an ornamental, the gazania linearis is considered moderately invasive in some areas by Cal IPC, "escaping into creekside vegetation and into native grassland from plantings in San Francisco, Monterey, and Ventura counties, where it can form a dense groundcover and outcompete other species."

Members of the Asteraceae family, gazanias' daisy-like flowers are most often seen in yellows and oranges, but also include red, coral, white and violet, plus many combinations thereof. Petals can have a different color at the base, for instance, or a strip of color down the middle,  or both.

The plants form 12-inch-wide mounds, 6 to 10 inches tall. Some nurseries sell gazanias as ground cover, but they also work in containers and as borders in drier flower beds. The flowers close at night so they are not good cut flowers.

Gazanias are not especially attractive to the big pollinators, since they produce pollen but not nectar. Think small bees, not butterflies. On the flip side they don't have pest or disease problems in our region. Just don't plant them in locations where the soil will stay soggy.

They do grow well from seed, maybe too well: I bought a pony pack of gazanias for my front yard probably 20 years ago. These days I have clumps in six different spots around the front area, and they are a multitude of colors -- I never know which color is going to show up next. At various times I've been ruthless about digging out larger clumps but most of the time I just let them live where they like.

Now that's the definition of an easy-care plant.