Creeping Phlox

This ornamental phlox is native to the eastern and central United States and was introduced into cultivation by the late 1700s. Creeping phlox is a hardy, evergreen, North American perennial forming clusters of violet-purple, pink or white flowers, often with star-shaped petal lobes in early to mid-spring and dense, bright green foliage.  John Bartram first cited this species when he wrote to Peter Collinson in December 1745 as it became one of the first "low-growing" species to enter Great Britain.¹ In his The American Flower Garden Directory, Philadelphia nurseryman and florist Robert Buist included the following description of this phlox: "In the spring of 1831, an eminent British collector [Thomas Drummond] exclaimed, on seeing a patch of P. subulata in one of the pine barrens of New Jersey, 'The beauty of that alone is worth coming to America to see, it is so splendid.'"² Pink, white, and red garden varieties were known by 1850.³

- Peggy Cornett, n.d.

Further Sources

• Coats, Alice M. Flowers and Their Histories. London: Black, 1968.
• Leighton, Ann. American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986.
• Thomas Jefferson Center for Historic Plants.