20 Popular Purple Perennials

Think of purple, which goes with almost any color, as a neutral for your garden. This mix of red and blue reads "cool" when you grow tall purple perennials with silver and blue plants or "warm" with you pair it with oranges and reds. Soften purple with white and pink plants for a serene look, or mingle purple perennials with bright yellows and hot oranges to add drama and contrast to containers, beds, borders and landscapes.

What Are Purple Perennials?

Unlike annuals that live for one year or growing season, perennial flowers and plants die back, go dormant and return for three or more years. Perennials might be long-lived, like peonies that can come back for decades, or short-lived, like delphiniums and columbines that usually die in two or three years. Perennials can be more expensive than annuals, but they're a good investment because they yield lots of blooms, year after year, for your gardening bucks.

How to Use Purple Perennials In Garden Design

Plant a monochromatic scheme: For a big impact, grow a monochromatic garden in the same color of purple, or combine shades like lavender and lilac.

Create the illusion of more space: Play with purple perennials to get different visual effects; for example, we tend to perceive dark purple plants as further away than plants in other colors, so they can make a garden space feel bigger. Tall purple perennials can also create a sense of depth in beds and borders when they're grown behind other plants.

Evoke a mood: Purple has long been associated with royalty, and purple garden plants are versatile enough to feel rich, vibrant, restful, calm or intense.

How to Care for Purple Perennials

Light: There are tall purple perennial flowers and plants for sun or shade; read their labels to know how much light and water to give them.

Fertilizer: Fertilize as needed, following the directions on your product.

Pests: Purple plants are subject to most of the same garden pests as other plants, but they have one advantage. Purple plants may actually help reduce garden pests by attracting hungry pollinators, like ladybugs that gobble up whiteflies and aphids on purple coneflowers.

Diseases: Most purple perennials are also subject to the same diseases as other plants (except for purple coneflowers, which are disease-resistant in general). As soon as you notice a problem, do some research to see how to manage it. Before you reach for chemicals or pesticides, try environmentally-friendly strategies, like adding compost to improve your soil's drainage and combat fungal diseases, or using controls like non-toxic sticky traps and insecticidal soaps.

Browse our list of regal beauties to find your favorite tall purple flowers and plants.

Purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) is a daisy-like perennial flower that's as tough as it is pretty. These butterfly magnets like full sun, tolerate dry soil and heat and bloom from summer into fall. Use them in rock gardens, beds, mixed borders, cutting gardens or native plantings. This purple coneflower cultivar, 'Magnus,' is a bright rosy-purple that matures at 30 to 36 inches tall. Cut the flowers when they fade to encourage it to rebloom. Hardy in USDA Gardening Zones 3 to 9.

Introduced in the 1940s, this dahlia, 'Thomas Edison' (Dahlia pinnata), still adds splashes of bright purple to modern gardens. Dahlias can take full sun, although Southern growers may need to give them afternoon shade to protect them from the intense heat. They're available in a range of sizes, from about 15 inches to over six feet tall; 'Thomas Edison' grows 3 to 4 feet. Dahlias grow from tubers that will die if they're left in the ground when the temperatures get close to freezing. If you live where the winters are warm and mild, you can leave them in the garden. Otherwise, treat them as annuals and replace them each year, or dig up the tubers, let them dry and store them for the winter in an unheated, dark place that won't freeze. Hardy in Zones 8 to 11.

'Gladiator', shown here, is an award-winning Allium, a member of the onion family. It's also one of the tallest Alliums. Its violet-blue, globe-shaped flowers (they're actually clusters of individual florets) grow to 6 inches in diameter atop 3 to 4 foot-tall stems. This ornamental onion blooms from late spring into early summer, attracts butterflies and other pollinators and resists deer and rabbits. Give this tall purple perennial flower full sun; it can tolerate partial shade. Grow masses of these bulbs to make a focal point or plant them in the back of beds and borders. Hardy in Zones 4 to 9.