Meet the Herb: Echinacea — How We Grow the Purple Coneflower at InVine Botanicals, Tallahassee FL

Here at InVine Botanicals, in our garden in Tallahassee, Florida, we grow a lot more than just the herbs that go into our balms. And one of our very favorite plants is this one: the purple coneflower, better known as echinacea. So let's take a few minutes to get to know it.

Echinacea is a hardy flowering perennial, and it's easily one of the most striking plants in our whole garden. In the middle of summer, our raised beds fill up with these tall, purple blooms standing well above the herbs around them. Botanically it's Echinacea purpurea, a member of the daisy family that's native to North America.

Each flower is daisy-like, with pinkish-purple petals that sweep back from a high, spiky, copper-orange center cone. Once you've grown one, you never mistake it for anything else. We grow all of our echinacea from seed, right here in our Tallahassee garden, and tend it by hand from the very first sprout.

It's a tough, drought-tolerant perennial that comes back year after year, and it absolutely loves our long Florida summers and full, open sun. Once it's established, it asks for very little. It grows in our raised beds right alongside the rest of the garden: the rosemary, the mints, the basil, the calendula, and all the herbs we grow for our balms.

And when the blooms finally open, the whole bed comes alive. Bees and butterflies work these flowers from morning to evening — echinacea is honestly one of the best pollinator plants you can put in a garden. It's been a favorite of cottage gardens and herb gardens for generations, grown for its beauty and for its long, dependable bloom that lasts well into the season.

When it comes time to harvest, we let each flower open fully before we ever pick it, so it's at its absolute best. Then we harvest the blooms by hand, one flower at a time — the same slow, careful way we harvest everything that grows in this garden. Nothing here is ever machine-cut.

Every stem, leaf, and flower is taken by hand, and only selectively, so the plants stay healthy and keep producing all season long. We only ever take what we need for the next small batch, and never strip a plant bare. And everything we cut — flowers and herbs alike — goes straight into a basket and comes indoors right away, while it's still fresh.

Indoors, the harvest is laid out to dry. Like all of our botanicals, the echinacea flowers are dried slowly, on screen racks, never rushed with high heat. We dry everything for four to nine days in a climate-controlled room — around seventy-six degrees, at low humidity, and always in the dark.

That combination is what protects the color of the petals and the character of the plant. The coneflowers dry right alongside the calendula, the roses, and the herbs — all part of the same season's harvest, coming in off the beds together. And we turn and tend the racks by hand, checking each one, until everything is fully dry and ready.

The echinacea we grow and dry is one of the garden botanicals that goes into our Moringa Face Cream, blended together with the other plants we grow ourselves. But honestly, we grow echinacea for more than just that. A garden full of coneflowers, bees, and color is a big part of what makes this work feel like more than just making a product — it's a reminder that everything we make really does start as a living plant in the ground.

So that's echinacea, the purple coneflower, from our Tallahassee garden. Everything we grow is harvested by hand and dried slowly before it ever becomes skincare. You can find all of our garden-grown balms and creams at invinebotanicals dot com.

Thanks for spending a little time in the garden with us.