How can you not love gaillardia's festive colors? A cheerful note in late season gardens, it’s a plant that does well even with scarce water and poor soil. Gaillardia are not tidy plants. Look closely and notice that every stage of growth is represented: green buds, fully opened flowers, partly-exhausted blooms and the final fuzzy seed heads. Theoretically, each blossom is an example of radial symmetry, but because the gardener sowed a mix of varieties, the petal shapes differ and some, well, some of them could instead be called examples of radial asymmetry.