I love to discover new plants, “discover” in the sense that I see a plant at a garden center or in someone’s garden for the first time and decide that it must find a place in my own garden. Such a discovery was a delightful creeping annual named mercadonia. It spreads quickly and its lovely yellow flowers and green foliage brighten my pots over the summer until frost.

I have used mercadonia to fill several roles in my pot arrangements. It can servesimultaneously as a filler and a spiller (trailer over the edge) in any combination that calls for a splash of yellow. I also learned during a hot North Carolina summer that it is quite drought tolerant.

When the photo on the left was taken in late July, both the mercadonia and the purple Wave™ petunias were thriving. The photo at right shows the same arrangement three weeks later, after it received no water in that period (we had no rain and were out of town visiting a granddaughter). The petunias didn’t survive, but the mercadonia proved itself as it lived on with very little stress.