Every year since 2001, Seattle’s Elisabeth C. Miller Botanical Garden has released an annual list of Great Plant Picks. Although especially well-suited to gardens in the Pacific Northwest, many of these plants are also outstanding choices for gardens across the country.

Butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds are the focus of this year’s GPP list, and Rick Peterson provides an excellent introduction to it in Pacific Horticulture.

“As temperatures warm, bees emerge from their winter slumber looking for nourishment,” Peterson writes, and since “crocus are among the garden’s earliest blooming bulbs,” the GPP list includes several such as C. tommasinianus, ‘Jeanne d’Arc’, ‘King of the Striped’, and ‘Mammoth Yellow’.

A few species tulips are also recommended, including T. clusiana and T. sylvestris which will have bees “bustling around the garden with satisfaction” and, in the right spot, will “reliably return year after year.”

Other Great Plant Picks that we’re offering now for delivery this fall include: extra early-blooming winter aconite, traditional snowdrop, and giant snowdrop, wildflowery Grecian windflower, ‘Gravetye Giant’ snowflake, and sowbread cyclamen, classic ‘Saint Keverne’, ‘Thalia’, and pheasant’s-eye daffodils, and elegant martagon and regal lilies.

Learn more and see the entire list organized into categories such as “Fantastic Foliage,” “Made in the Shade,” and “Plants that Make Scents” at greatplantpicks.org/plantlists/search.

Crocus tommasinianus

martagon lily

‘Thalia’ daffodil