Growing Yarrow: A Complete Profile
By Growing Home Greens Team · July 29, 2026
Yarrow is a hardy perennial known for its flat-topped flower clusters and its toughness once established. It tolerates poor soil, drought, and deer browsing better than most garden flowers.
Sowing it
Yarrow is flexible on start method: sow indoors about 9 weeks before your last frost, or direct-sow right around that date. Scatter seed on the soil surface and leave it uncovered, since it needs light to germinate. Expect about 100 days to first bloom. It’s drought-tolerant and deer-resistant once established, though a first-year planting still needs regular water to get there.
Keeping it upright and in bounds
Floppy, sprawling growth usually means soil that’s too rich or too much shade. Yarrow prefers lean soil and full sun, and pampering it with rich soil or heavy fertilizer produces weaker stems than leaving it in a leaner spot, regardless of variety. Established clumps benefit from dividing every few years to keep the planting vigorous. If unwanted spread is the bigger worry, a sterile named cultivar keeps yarrow from reseeding and running the way the straight species can.
A tough, low-maintenance pollinator border
Yarrow isn’t linked to specific companions or antagonists in our data. See the full companion guide for yarrow for how it’s tracked. As a tough, low-maintenance perennial that supports pollinators and beneficial insects, it’s a solid border pick in the Garden Designer for a vegetable bed that wants more beneficial-insect traffic without extra care.
Sources: Rain Garden Plants: Achillea millefolium - Yarrow, Clemson Home & Garden Information Center; Achillea ‘Coronation Gold’, Chicago Botanic Garden.
Companion planting guide for Yarrow · Find your planting dates
Typically viable in USDA zones 3-9. Not sure your zone? Look it up by ZIP code.
Method: Either: Start indoors for an earlier harvest, or direct-sow outside for less fuss. Yarrow tolerates either.
See exact start-indoors, direct-sow, and harvest dates for your zone →
How many Yarrow plants fit per square foot?
Spacing: 1 per square foot (square-foot-gardening spacing). Mature height: 2-3 ft.
Varieties worth considering
- Coronation Gold (Achillea × 'Coronation Gold'): Straight-species yarrow spreads by rhizome and reseeds itself, which is a problem in a small bed. Clemson HGIC recommends sterile cultivars specifically to limit that spread, and Coronation Gold is a sterile hybrid that won't crowd out its neighbors the way seed-grown yellow yarrow can. It still wants full sun and lean soil to stay upright; sterility fixes the spreading, not the flopping. (source)
- 'Moonshine': Chicago Botanic Garden lists this at a shorter 2 feet with bright yellow flowers on lacy fernlike foliage, an RHS Award of Garden Merit winner. Shorter and less brassy-gold than Coronation Gold, useful for a front-of-bed spot rather than a taller back-of-border planting. (source)
- 'Paprika': Also Chicago Botanic Garden, vivid red flowers with yellow eyes rather than the yellow tones of Coronation Gold or Moonshine. A different color if you want yarrow's toughness without another yellow flower in the bed. (source)
Cited from the source shown next to each variety. We haven't grown these ourselves yet, so treat this as a research-backed starting point, not a personal endorsement.
Where to buy yarrow seeds
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See it growing
Search YouTube for "growing yarrow" videos → (a live search, not a hand-picked video; results vary and aren't vetted by us)
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Growing Yarrow: A tough, drought-tolerant native perennial that pulls in beneficial insects once it's established.
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