Yarrow ‘Rainbow Tricolor’ (Achillea millfolium) is a selection from a North American species that parades its sophisticated flowers with multi-colored details, sometimes yellow-orange, edged with red, sometimes salmon-colored, an artistic complement to a rainbow trout or sprinkled on cheese tortellini with pink sauce. A few fine lace leaves are enough to brighten up your flowerbeds, offering a particular texture and silver highlights. Prefer its young leaves, softer and tender, infused in omelettes, promoting the digestion of fatty soups and dishes in sauce, where their aroma replaces sage and rosemary. It can be used like hops, in craft brews, helping to preserve beer, among other things. Attractive to many beneficial insects while being repellent to harmful insects, it confuses their olfactory tracks, limiting infestations. Deer and other animals leave it alone. It tolerates all kinds of neglect, not being affected by drought or urban pollution, flowering for a long time in poor or slightly acidic soil. A second flowering can follow if you harvest the flowers, which will prevent it from reseeding.

Yarrow ‘Rainbow Tricolor’ is less expansive than the wild species which tends to spread quickly, but it remains an excellent ground cover that is easier to maintain. Divide the tillers after 3 to 5 years to maintain flowering vigor.