Honeybees on Fall Flowers

While visiting the Mt. Cuba Center this past weekend I was treated to a variety of fall wildflowers with fall colors right around the corner.

The gardeners there do such an amazing job, and they've introduced a number of cultivars over the years that I find well worth the effort in tracking down.

And of course now that they have a few honeybee hives on the property it's become far more apparent what native plants the bees really love. Now that Mountain Mint has finished blooming, I believe the winner of most perennial beds will be the common New England Aster, Symphyotrichum novae-angliae.

New England Asters come in a variety of colors but I've found the purple to be the most common. Pink, brilliant shades of Red, White and everything in between are also possible. Lost of cultivars are available on the market today and they're pretty easy grow by division or spreading seeds in pots of dirt outside over the winter. They can be slightly weedy but sometimes it's worth it to let them flower before pulling. A friend of mine had New England Asters take over his meadow garden but now he has every color in the rainbow.

Symphyotrichum laeve 'Bluebird' is an up right perennial that grows more flowers than the true species. This is because it's actually a hybrid with another species, though I don't know the particulars on that. They look great if you can grow them. I've tried in the past and believe they benefit from regular watering, and or mulch, as opposed to testing out their drought tolerance. I don't believe this cultivar is prolific by seed, but they are pretty when grown beside other asters or goldenrod of similar height.

Aromatic Aster 'October Skies' is wonderful in mass plantings. A cultivar of Symphyotrichum olongifolium, this is a low growing aster which lays on the ground forming thick cloud-like pillows of flowers. Perfect at the edge of a flower bed or scattered among a meadow/garden of low plants.

White Woodland Aster... actually I'm a little unclear what species this one in particular is. It's one of the lower growing species with masses of white blooms. Oddly enough I have a species or two of these that come up wild in my yard and I only rarely see honeybees take a liking to them. At Mt. Cuba the clumps they had growing in the sparse woodland were getting a decent amount of attention. Not as much as any of the other asters but certainly more than anything else flowering in the woods.

Vernonia angustifolia 'Plum Peachy' is a form of Narrow-leaf Ironweed with darker foliage and is more compact than the wild species. I believe it may also have flowers more evenly spread around it as opposed to just at the tips of stems but I could be confusing that with another the Mt. Cuba Center has/is working on.

 I didn't think to take photos of the foliage at the time but it has nice narrow leaves and looked similar to other cultivars of ironweed I'd seen in local nurseries. It was getting a decent amount of attention, slightly more so than the goldenrods growing around it but I know honeybees don't go nuts for goldenrod until after the peak Aster blooms. I'm planting three of these this fall and putting them right in next to my narrow-leaf Amsonia to see if they grow well at all.

Stiff Goldenrod, Solidago rigida, was blooming well. This was the first time I've ever seen this species and I was taken by how big and fat the flower petals are which you usually don't even notice on Goldenrods. They had a patch of 50 or so plants, or at least that's about how many flowering stems there were.

Just thought this was a good shot. Had the bee been posed a little better I'd go as far to say excellent.

Noticed some spittle bugs on the stem. They produce a foam or "spit" to hide within while they feed on the plant much like an aphid. 

Solidago 'Fireworks' was also flowering, though not getting as much attention as I've seen it get in the past. (The huge hungry mantis about to lay an egg casing might have something to do with that.) It's also not quite at its peak bloom yet and that's really when honeybees tend to take over such nectar sources.

Obedient Plant is typically swarming with pollinators but I didn't find that to be the case that day. At least it wasn't for the patch that was next to the path. They also have it planted out in the meadow itself for a lovely pink effect but I didn't notice much flying around.

Mistflower, Conoclinum coelestinum. I was slightly surprised to see honeybees on this one. First off I've never been able to get this species to grow in my yard. They have water requirements that are somewhat finicky; too wet and they don't survive the winter, too dry and they won't reproduce. I read they're ideally a shade plant and the more sunlight they receive the more moisture they require. The Mt. Cuba Center had them in full sun, at the bottom of a slope.

Honeybees use other plants that were formerly in the Eupatorium genus. Pretty much all of Joe Pye Weeds are a hit with them, but only some of the Boneset species.

Our native Blue Lobelia, Lobelia siphilitica, is an upright, sometimes hard to establish and other times weedy perennial, with tube shaped pale blue flowers. I observe that while this is a wetland species, specamins growing closest to the water are among the shortest at around 2' at most while those growing farther away could reach up to 5' though 3 and a half certainly seemed more the norm.

Honeybees are perfectly capable of working the flowers but I noticed none of them were bothering to do so. The only flowers they visited were ones which carpenter bees had already chewed holes in.

And lastly, I noticed honeybees working one of the Heucheras. This is a genus of plants with hundreds of cultivars that offer every color imaginable. They're mostly pollinated by flies but a certain few, typically ones with larger (for the genus) white flowers are visited by bees.

This particular species was mass planted near the Round Garden and the bees were gathering up nectar, and just look at that wonderful deep red pollen.

Mt. Cuba Center's 9th Annual Wildflower Celebration (3 of 3)

False Indigo, Baptisia australis, was just poking up out of their prairie.

These should quickly open up into the foliage and the flowers.

They're doing a trial on a bunch of cultivars available and I hope to be attending the class there at the Mt. Cuba Center. It falls on my birthday, May 16, so it's my way of treating myself.

One of the concession vendors had a popcorn maker that looked like it may have been the model-T of its day. I got to taste a little and wasn't impressed. The popcorn was fairly flavorless, didn't seem to be salted, and they'd used caramelized sugar (which was burned by just a hint) instead of butter or canola oil. Still it was good to see and try.

Elsewhere in the Trial Garden they were still running their Heucheras from last year. I was handed a flag and asked to put it next to which one I thought was the best. Heucheras aren't something I'm drawn to as most of them are either wind pollinated or only visited by flies, but many gardeners love them for their wonderful foliage and diversity of leaf color. For whatever reason, I seemed to be drawn to this copper colored one, Heuchera 'Southern Comfort' and I wasn't alone in my decision.

The forest edge garden is home to many dogwoods, elderberries, redbuds that are actually red flowering, and a fair number of other plants I'm sure.

Directly across from this garden was a kids event. In years past they'd focused on caterpillars, but this year they focused on ants and plants that disperse their seeds with packets of elaiosome! Best of all, they were given fruit snacks for carrying their seeds through an obstacle course!

The Round Garden was filled with dozens of nonnative plants being used as nonnatives should be, as ornaments to accent our native plants, rather than being the standard in our landscapes.

An Anemone caught my eye just down the way, but I don't think it's a native one. I could be wrong.

Also on the day of the Wildflower Celebration was a Raptor Bird Demonstration. Here a Screech Owl was placed upon a perch for visitors to take pictures of. Later on they had this little guy out when they talked about them but I don't believe we ever got to see him fly (they're nocturnal anyhow).

This was a Hawk (of some sort), forgive me, we were actually shown five or six different types of birds and I can't recall the names of them all.

All of these birds were rescues or born with defects. And rather than having them put down they're used for demonstration and educational purposes.

A few of them got to fly around. Mostly this was to and from trainers, and various stands they'd setup for them to land on.

I think this was a Red Shouldered Hawk.

This was a Red Tailed Hawk.

Here is a Turkey Vulture. This guy was quite the character. Prior to the show, the speaker had explained their birds might take off and land in the trees or venture about the area a little, and that this was fine. Mostly these birds don't get the chance to do this much flying in a given day and when they do they don't usually have this much open space to practice in.

Well after taking off he decided to land up in a tree, and then instead of returning to the trainer he flew up onto the main house.

And as he'd done this, he'd attracted the attention of other Vultures in the area which decided to fly down closer to see what was going on.

He took off and landed in a great big pine tree, and the other Vulture actually came down and landed in it with him. And I thought this was all amazing.

Did I mention this entire day was free and open to the public?

Coreopsis Testing

Tall Tickseed, is but one of the plants I saw at the Mt. Cuba Center's trial garden. Their trial garden had been under construction until earlier in the year, but I hadn't been to it since their wild flower celebration earlier in this April. This plant caught my eye because I grow the non-cultivar of it, which is about 2 images shorter, around 4' instead of 7'.

There were a number of Coreopsis growing there. Here are some of what I thought were the highlights.

Coreopsis 'Summer Punch' caught my eye because it reminded me of the true species of Blanket Flower, Gaillardia aristata. One could almost grow the two together.

Coreopsis 'Sienna Sunset' it surprises me how much I like the color on this. The flower is a bronzed salmon tone that I want to say makes it a very unique color.

Coreopsis rosea 'Dreamcatcher' was the brightest and most lush looking of the purples. I think they said species growing in double rows there were annuals. The idea though was to grow them in a garden setting, but I'm not sure if that includes regular watering.

Coreopsis integrifolia had a very striking flower to it. I think they were growing it more to test its cold hardiness as it's native to Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. My fingers are crossed that it survives.

They were also testing out Heucheras. Now, the majority of these are shade plants, so what's photographed here is their full sun testing. That tarp that's going around in the back is covering the full shade area of the trial garden where they had hundreds of Heucheras growing. This isn't a group of plants that I've ever wanted to grow because they're more about the foliage than the flowers. They come in a wide variety of colors though and easily add class to the garden. The shade garden in the summertime in particular tends to need some coloring up. So these are a great plant but not for me. 

So the real reason for me going to the Mt. Cuba Center was to learn about the Asteraceae plant family, which I'll get into more detail a little later.