Heart of the Garden

I recently realized that all of my echinacea was infected with aster yellows. An odd-sounding bacterial(ish) disease spread by leaf hoppers! (And even more frustrating, the name is inexplicably plural). The bacterium causes the flower petals to lose their color and turn from pink to green. This greening is very poetically referred to as virescence. It also makes the flowers sprout mini mutant leafy structures from the center cone. I thought this was called fasciation, but no! The botanical community has named this symptom phyllody.

Fasciation is the elongation of vascular growth, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be caused by a disease. It could be just plain old benign abnormality.

There is no cure for aster yellows. I just had to pull all my echinacea. Not fun.