Sitting on the couch sometime last winter with my trusty perennial catalogue in hand, I gawked over the Pyromania red hot pokers or torch lilies. When they arrived and were sitting in the driveway, I told Mrs. Jan they had such a beautiful texture I would want them even if they never bloomed. That night, looking at the catalogue, I selected Pyromania Backdraft and Pyromania Orange Blaze, two of the six varieties in the series that gives you choices in yellow, orange and red shades.
In my two previous experiences with the red hot poker, they were both used in cottage garden settings, in the Columbus Botanical Garden close to the historic farmhouse and at the Coastal Georgia Botanical Garden, oddly at the Cottage Garden next to the historic old house residence of the USDA Plant Introduction Station.
They were beautiful at both places and bloomed every year. Oddly, I never saw anyone doing anything to them other than maybe pulling a weed or planting a companion. That tells you immediately they must not be too hard to grow.
