Berlandiera lyrata (Chocolate Flower)

Chocolate Flower (Berlandiera lyrata) is a southwestern native with one of the best garden party tricks in the plant world. Its cheerful yellow daisies, with dark red-brown center disks, release a distinct cocoa fragrance in the cool of morning, strongest just before the day warms. Stand next to a patch at 7 a.m. and you are standing in a chocolate shop.

It is native to the dry limestone grasslands and mesa edges of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, and to northern Mexico (not the Pacific Northwest). In its home range it flowers May through October; in our milder PNW gardens, June into October is typical. Open composite flowers feed bees, native solitary bees, small butterflies, and other short-tongued generalists through a long season.

NAEB records four ethnobotanical uses by the Keres (Western), including sedative and spice preparations.

Habit: low mounded perennial, 12 to 18 inches tall and as wide, with gray-green deeply-lobed lyre-shaped leaves (the species epithet).

Conditions: full sun, lean well-drained to rocky soil, low water. Thrives on neglect and heat. Hardy Zone 4 to 9. In wet PNW winters, site on a slope or in a gravel bed for drainage; it is not a coastal wet-winter plant. Deer-resistant and rabbit-resistant. Companions for a PNW dry-garden bed: Gaillardia aristata, Penstemon pinifolius, Achillea millefolium, Eriogonum umbellatum.