There are few things more beautiful than a garden in full bloom. When you’re crafting your space, it’s important to choose plants that work well together.
If you’re a fan of yarrow’s delicate yellow, pink, or white flowers, self-sowing abilities, and skill for replenishing poor soil with rich nutrients, you may want to consider adding plants to your garden that develops a symbiotic relationship with yarrow.
Yarrow is a great companion plant for a variety of trees, vegetables, and flowers including brassicas, strawberries, and lavender.
Yarrow is a competitive perennial plant that’s drought-resistant, provides cover for shade-loving plants, activates compounds through its root system to help nearby plants fight disease, and brings pollinators like bees and butterflies to your garden.
In addition to being a great companion plant, yarrow also has many medicinal uses such as aiding in digestion, reducing inflammation, and even treating wounds, making it a valuable addition to any garden.
Paired with the proper plants, yarrow can bring benefits, balance, and blooms to your garden. Check out these 10 best yarrow companion plants to add to your garden today.
Yarrow Companion Plants
Learn more about other suitable companion plants:
1. Lavender
When you plant lavender near a yarrow, they make wonderful companion plants. That’s because both plants’ fragrance work together to attract honeybees, butterflies, and lacewings to the area where they can pollinate plants that have a timid scent.
Double-flowered roses, for instance, get a boost from lavender and yarrow grown together nearby. Grown together, lavender and yarrow scent scare away aphids and other destructive insects while filling your garden with lovely perfume.
Lavender and yarrow also enjoy similar sun-drenched and dry conditions, which helps them provide a good support network for other plants, vegetables, and flowers that might struggle during hot, dry summer months.
As companion plants, lavender and yarrow plants’ white or yellow blooms provide a visually pleasing contrast to lavender’s pastel hues that make it a favorite blend for gardens, patios, and other outdoor spaces.
2. Grape Vines
With vivid colors and nectarous scents, the yarrow plant is a wonderful pollinator-attractor and home for bees that can help fruiting plants like grape vines flourish and increase crop yields.
Although yarrow has a potent fragrance, the good news is that this doesn’t leach into grape flavors. This is an important thing to consider when adding a companion plant to your garden vineyard.
That’s because when grapes are used to make wine, a wine aficionado can detect subtle flavor variances that indicate the quality of the wine production.
3. Brassicas
You don’t always have to pair yarrow with a fruit or flowering plant.
Hardy, versatile, and shade-providing, yarrow makes a good companion plant for several delicate vegetables from the Brassica family. Brassicas include cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli, bok choi, spinach, brussel sprouts, and others.
Placing yarrow and brassicas close together can help ward off hungry insects that tend to destroy the tender leaves on these types of plants. That way, your delicate veggies can grow strong and healthy without getting riddled with bug bites.
Yarrow also brings another major benefit for brassica vegetables by helping cool down the plants that are grown in open, sunny, and hot spots. Since yarrow can grow up to 3 feet tall, it is a helpful shade perennial that can give brassicas the shade that they need.
While your vegetables may thrive more due to optimal pollination, shade and predator protection, just make sure that your yarrow plants don’t overcrowd your brassica growing in the same space.
4. Nightshades
Yarrow is a powerful protector for plants such as tomatoes and eggplant that belong to the nightshade family. These delicate-skinned vegetables are a magnet for aphids and other destructive garden insects.
When nightshades are planted next to yarrow, the yarrow plant wards off these little terrors that can ruin your fresh produce.
Even if the yarrow doesn’t keep all the fruit-eating insects away, they provide a welcome refuge for predatory wasps that will hunt the bad bugs and allow your tomatoes, eggplants, or potatoes to reach their full potential.
Not only does yarrow attract good bugs and repel bad ones, but it also replenishes the soil with phytonutrients that can help your nightshades produce bigger and juicier fruit.
Just make sure to prune back your yarrow regularly, since this vigorous plant can overwhelm nightshade plants rooted in the same area.
5. Orange Trees or Apple Trees
The sky’s the limit when it comes to plants that thrive near the yarrow plant. Even though yarrow won’t grow to tower over the apple or orange trees in your orchard, they will lure waves of bees into your yard.
During times when drought conditions dampen your fruit trees’ ability to attract pollinators, yarrow will take over and welcome butterflies, bees, and wasps that all promote the pollinating and fruit-bearing process.
Wherever it is planted, the yarrow gives back to the earth by infusing the soil where it is planted with a nutrient boost. From attracting pollinators to warding off pests and sending out nutrients through its root system, planting yarrow in your garden can help ensure a healthier bumper crop.
6. Rosemary
Together, yarrow and rosemary create a pest-fighting powerhouse that combines rosemary’s strong, piney scent of the forest with yarrow’s lighter, grassier scent. These herbs work in tandem both with their benefits and complementary fragrances.
While yarrow has persistent growth patterns and a delicate, bug-deterrent scent, rosemary also produces an oil that helps keep aphids, worms, and slugs away from your garden.
Both plants thrive when grown together in a sunny, well-drained spot.
7. Oregano
Just like rosemary, oregano is a potent herb that creates a partnership of protection with the yarrow plant.
Grown together, yarrow and oregano help provide a good root system, mulch, soil coverage and shade cover for other kinds of plants that struggle in full sun and dry conditions.
These two plants form a powerful pest perimeter. While oregano derives great benefits from yarrow’s roots which provide a nutrient boost to the surrounding soil, the two plants don’t usually compete for space. Since yarrow can have sprawling growth patterns, keep an eye out for when it’s time to trim.
8. Basil
Since yarrow and basil are both herbs, they get along well when planted together in the same space.
Having yarrow and basil in proximity helps basil plants reach their full growth potential without suffering from bug destruction.
It’s also good to know that growing basil and yarrow close together won’t create a clash of scents. Some plants smell wrong when in the same vicinity, but yarrow + basil’s herbal scents work well together.
9. Garlic or Chives
Garlic might not be the first plant that comes to mind when you’re thinking about companion plants for your favorite yarrow.
The truth is that garlic or chives from the allium family’s pungent, spicy odor pairs perfectly with yarrow’s potent scent.
Thanks to this strong combination, many insects are confused and avoid the area. That’s why it’s a good idea to plant alliums and yarrow together in an area of your garden where flowers or vegetables keep getting eaten up by bugs.
Garlic is a more laid-back allium that doesn’t tend to get overwhelmed by yarrow’s growth patterns. Chives similarly are more delicate alliums that keep more to themselves in the garden bed. Yarrow also plows natural fertilizer and nutrients back into the soil and supports resilient allium plants.
While garlic soaks up yarrow’s nutrient benefits, not all alliums will thrive in these conditions. Onions, for example, are more competitive and take up more space and nutrients as their complex root systems break through obstacles in their path.
Since yarrow also keeps expanding its root system as it grows, this can create a nightmare web of roots that compete for space.
10. Thyme
Like yarrow, thyme is an herb that enjoys a sunny, dry environment. This plant can entwine with yarrow since yarrow is a self-sower that propagates itself year after year, while thyme regenerates through constant reseeding.
Both plants provide a compatible herbal fragrance while attracting good bugs and repelling invaders from your garden.
Final Thoughts
Choosing the right companion plants and figuring how to coax the most out of your patch is an important part of successful gardening.
Knowing how yarrow works with different kinds of plants can bring many nutrient benefits that make your garden’s soil more fertile while making it a pollinated space that’s freer from harmful insects.
Adding yarrow to your garden and pairing it with the right plants can elevate your garden space, boost fragrance, and offer protection for more delicate plants.
A carefully curated patch of yarrow will act as a “garden physician” to nature and bring out the best in everything wherever it’s planted.
Hey, I’m Lisa and I’ve been an avid gardener for over 30 years. I love writing, talking and living in the garden! Feel free to connect with me on my socials below
