Autumn Native Plant Garden Tour 2013

Mountain Mint, Pycnanthemum sp.
Wild Senna, Senna hebecarpa (seed pods)
New England Aster, Symphyotrichum novae-angliae (Pink and Purple)
Goldenrod 'fireworks' Solidago rugosa 'fireworks'
Perennial Sunflower, Helianthus maximiliani
Small Woodland Sunflower, Helianthus microcephalus
Anise Hyssop, Agastache foeniculum
White Woodland Aster or Heath Aster, Eurybia sp.
False Sunflower or Early Sunflower, Heliopsis helianthoides
Northern Blazingstar, Liatris scariosa (might be Liatris borealis)
Threadleaf Ironweed, Vernonia lettermanii
Showy Goldenrod, Solidago speciosa
Smooth Blue Aster, Symphyotrichum laeve
Sky Blue Aster, Symphyotrichum oolentangiense
Purpledisk Sunflower or Appalachian Sunflower, Helianthus atrorubens
Western Sunflower, Helianthus occidentalis
Cutleaf Coneflower, Rudbeckia laciniata




This video features both Swamp Sunflower, Helianthus angustifoliu and Narrow-leaf Sunflower, Helianthus salicifolius. I'm confused as to which is which. The tallest one at the end is supposedly a true species of H. angustifolius, while all the others are supposedly cultivars of H. salicifolius, however I find the same cultivar names listed as H. angustifolius species but never at the same nursery. What's more the two species can also hybridize and often grow in the same locations in the wild.... H. salicifolius supposedly just doesn't get as tall... but I'm unaware of any other differences between the two species, so I'm starting to feel it really doesn't matter which species you have. Even the flowers to both look the same.

The Wet Year of Wild Senna

So back before I knew what type of soil I had, where the drainage was, where the wet spots were, I planted a Wild Senna, Senna hebecarpa.

As it turns out that was an awful spot to plant it. It's just too dry there. The plant finally got healthy enough to flower last year after three or four years of trying to grow there. 

This year is shaping up to be one of the wettest on record. Normally right now we'd be in a three week long drought with almost no rainfall lasting more than a half hour at most. Now though it's been raining for a good hour or more, and sometimes about half the day, with flood warning and severe thunderstorms happening almost daily.

The added rain has allowed this plant to flower like crazy.

Pretty.

All that being said, I'm a little disappointed by the amount of pollinators showing up. The main problem is that plants only produce pollen, which seems typical of most of the pea family.

Best of Nature 2011

This catagory is generally reserved for plants and animals that don't fit in the other areas. This past year was a big one for this group as I decided to install a small prairie and visited the Mt. Cuba Center far more often.

The trees in winter. This is just behind my house.

Crocuses in our lawn provide an early splash of color. They do best in the driest parts that are otherwise bone dry over the summer. They're not native to North America and I'm at a loss to name anything flowering when they do that would work well in a lawn setting.

Bluets, Hedyotis caerulea, would be a nice choice but this is my first year with them. What they need to grow seems to be questionable. Pictured above is the patch at the Mt. Cuba Center which seem to grow great in partial to full shade among the moss. Other sources tell me they need to be bone dry and in full sun. Regardless, they actually don't do that well in areas where grasses will out compete them. I actually don't know what pollinates them.

Hepatica is quickly becoming one of my favorite spring blooms. They're kind of like bluets but the flower is larger. They have semi-evergreen foliage too, where new leaves are produced every spring to replace older ones. 

Twinleaf, Jeffersonia diphylla. If I were rich, I'd plant more of these. Of three plants only one flowers, and that flower only lasts 8 hours at most. Online pictures show that multiple plants will all flower on the same day so I'd be curious to find out if different patches of these plants would bloom on different days. That is to what degree do they synchronize their bloom? It's pretty for a day but not something I'd recommend starting out. They're really more of a collector's item.

Spring Beauty, Claytonia virginica, flowering among some bluets. They're not as pink as I expected them to be.

Violets and Trilliums. Violets are supposed to have ants carry their seeds off... clearly the ants aren't doing a good job. All of the small green sprouts in the lower portion of the pictures are violets. Trilliums on the other hand take 5 years before they really get as big. I've found the two can grow well together as most Trilliums are taller than the clumps of violets growing below.

Playing with angles and the Trillium flowers.

Trillium grandiflorum is an excellent spring ephemeral. For the first week of flowering they are all white. Slowly over the second week, depending on age and pollination, the flowers fade pink and magenta.

Blue False Indigo, Baptisia australis. This flowered much sooner than I expected it to. The flowers are almost exclusively pollinated by bumblebees. Despite this though they are a very stately plant, good as a hedge, a clump of 3 or more, or specimen.

New Jersey Tea, Ceanothus americanus. I have 4 of these small shrubs which are all nowhere near their full size, but I'm happy to see say all of them are flowering this year. This shrub is in something of a nation wide decline and the range to the dozen or so Lepidoptera that depend on it have been suffering for it. Some of these are endangered species. I encourage anyone willing to give this shrub a try. The flower clusters are small but supposidly buzz with insect activity when in abundance. None of my plants are old enough for that activity yet but hopefully I'll get to see it in years to come. 

If nothing else, let it be known that this was the year I went nuts with milkweed. I bought a couple dozen plants from either Prairie Moon Nursery or Prairie Nursery. I forget exactly which one provided these plants. (I have an awful habit of spending ~$500 every year on plants.)

Turk's Cap Lily, Lilium superbum. I'm thrilled to see not only are my plants producing more flowers but they also seem to be reproducing a little. Lilies are one of those weird flowers that require a swallowtail butterfly to hang upside down from them in order to pollinate it. This isn't a common sight so having more flowers increases the chances of it happening while I'm around.

I wasn't very successful with sunflowers this year but at the local community garden they've mastered growing them. Most of these flowers are coming off of 3 or 4 plants. Some of them there had 50 flowers open at a time. The structure looked more like a Christmas tree than your typical annual sunflower.

Wild Senna, Senna hebecarpa, growing in front of Joe Pye Weed, which are now in the genus Eutrochium.

Nymph Milkweed Bugs, Oncopeltus fasciatus, huddling together on their host plant. None of my plants seem to get swarmed the way I see some do. I've seen plants that were overrun with these bugs. It got to the point where they were spilling off onto other plants.

Blue Monkshood, Aconitum uncinatum. When people think of monkshood usually they think of an upright perennial. North America has a species or two of it's own though. This species in particular grows as a vine that only reaches 5' tall. They die back to the ground each year so they stay in check. In the absence of anything to climb on they'll grow along the ground. They don't set down roots as they like but the rhizome will send up more and more shoots each year as an expanding clump. For most of the year they're nothing special. When they flower in late summer though they have loads of flowers all over.

Something I noticed with the Mt. Cuba Center, They seem to be going a little nuts with these plants, along with Bugbanes, Cimicifuga species. There aren't a whole lot of flowering perennials for full shade in the summer months so they are almost stock piling these plants in their wooded area. Personally I'd love to include more of both in my garden.

Full sun areas over the summer show a different story. Flowering plants are abundant and in assorted colors.




This was a great year for Monarchs as well as Hummingbirds. Both took to the plants I started growing this year nicely.

As autumn rolls in the asters bloom out. New England Asters, Symphyotrichum novae-angliae, are among the best at getting pollinator activity.

And so is the goldenrod. This is the first year I've ever seen a Monarch on my Tall Goldenrod, Solidago altissima. Normally it blooms to late in the year, just after most of the Monarchs have passed through my part of New Jersey.

The seed heads to Tall Coreopsis, Coreopsis tripteris.

The Meadow at Mt. Cuba

I attended another Meadow Studies class at the Mt. Cuba Center this month. The previous one from last month I found to be a little boring. Their their meadow is primarily grasses, and rather few plants were blooming at the time. To their credit I am bias against grasses, and generally anything wind pollinated. Lush grassy meadows have their place, but during the month of July they look like a lawn in desperate need of mowing. As the year progresses though species like Big Bluestem, Andropogon gerardii, and Yellow Indian Grass, Sorghastrum nutans, come into their own. These tall grasses grow to be 6' high and there's nothing more majestic looking that watching their seed heads flowing with the wind. The whole meadow comes alive swaying with every gust like an ocean of plants.  Unfortunately the effect doesn't photograph well, at least not with my camera, and the perspective seems to always be off somehow.

Even here peering through a mossy clearing the grasses barely look 3' tall. As the grasses grow taller they become easier to appreciate.

Before going to the meadow they had patches of Spotted Touch-me-not, Impatiens capensis, flowering. This native Impatient is anything but. Seeds germinate after 2 winters and the resulting plant is an annual. They're fun plants because of their exploding seed pods, but if you're looking for any sort of predictability as to where they'll come up, you need to plant seeds in the same spot 3 years in a row. From there they're a delightful weed, growing in wet spots, and attracting hummingbirds. (Supposedly the sap helps clear up poison ivy but I'm not advocating holistic remedies. I would be willing to try it out though.)

Bottle Gentian, Gentiana andrewsii, was also in bloom. These flowers are fussy and hard for most bees to open. The idea with the tight petioles is to discourage ants from stealing nectar. As you can see, carpenter bees and perhaps others, have little issue just cutting holes right through the flowers to get the nectar. This happens to a lot of tube and bell shaped flowers.

 

Moving out into the meadow, the real highlights were the Wild Senna, Cassia hebecarpa, and assorted Joe Pye Weeds, Eutrochium fistulosum and Eutrochorium maculatum.  

Note: Joe Pye Weed was formerly in the genus Eupatorium. That genus still exists but I believe it consists mostly of the taller white flowering species that aren't Boneset. Eutrochium includes all purple/pink flowering members of Eupatorium now. Personally I think this is a conspiracy concocted by the plant labeling community. 

Anyway, I feel like they understated their Wild Senna a bit. It was in full bloom and not really mentioned until I asked. They did this with a number of plants but it's not like it was a bad tour. Actually we got up close and personal with 25 meadow species with lots of other goodies along the way. The instructor was more than happy to talk about all plants in the gardens people asked about. 

This is the host plant to the Cloudless Sulphur, Phoebis sennae, which isn't the most common butterfly around, but it's certainly unique enough looking to warrant their host plant in any butterfly garden. The pea-like seeds are also an excellent food source for certain birds.

Brown-Eyed Susan, Rudbeckia triloba. This is also called Thin-leaved Coneflower, but I feel that implies a different genus. It didn't seem to be spreading around like the other Rudbeckia species in their meadow.

Monarchs were all over their milkweed. They have lots of species of milkweed there but most of it is well past flowering. Also an abundance of insects that help nibble the plants to the ground were starting to show up. 

I found this skipper on their Ironweed, Vernonia noveboracensis, to be rather attractive. The colors reminded me of a robin or some sort of bird.

Here is a some type of cultivated Coneflower from one of their other gardens. The tube shaped flowers almost imply hummingbirds should drink from them. 


There were many other things flowering in their meadow, it's just I'm not into things like Obedient plant, Physostegia virginiana, and some type of perennial sunflower, Helianthus microcephalus. There were some early Goldenrods too.

My Prairie Update

Alright I've spend enough posts about other gardens, how's my prairie project going?

It's at least colorful looking minus all the clutter laying around. It's weird nice I think my yard looks in person. There's something about posting photos of it on the internet for all to see that really brings out the clutter.

Here it is from another angle. One of the species of Coreopsis has gone completely dormant/dead. All of the Western Spiderwort seems to be dying back after they flowered. The milkweed is doing great, they have flowers and are sending up even more shoots, with at least 3 or 4 of the 12 plants flowering at any given time. Next year everything should go extremely well.

I've since been transplanting some Liatris into the garden from elsewhere in the garden. I find Liatris to be neat as they don't have much of a root structure but moving them triggers flowering to start immediately.

There's a nice patch of Black Eyed Susan in the older prairie garden next to the tree. They're as mutated as ever naturally. 

Cassia hebecarpa, Wild Senna, has started flowering. This is a host plant to the Cloudless Sulphur Butterfly, Phoebis sennae with emphasis on the flowers and seed pods. Leaves are mostly a secondary option for caterpillar consumption. I'd like to plant more of this as the butterfly is quite nice looking.

And speaking of butterflies I've attracted to the yard. Here is either the Spicebush Swallowtail or Black Swallowtail. I have a spicebush but it's very tiny. I have lots of things in the carrot family about which are what black swallowtails love. I'm not certain which this is but I found a picture of a spicebush swallowtail that matches this one perfectly and that's what I'm siding with. It's a shame I don't have a more suitable host plant for it though.

Lilium superbum, Turks Cap Lily, started flowering elsewhere in the garden. I have a cultivar of this in the prairie garden but frankly it looks as effed up looking as that black eyed susan flower. Not sure who thought the thing was pretty enough to cultivate, as the true species lacks random growths and tendril-like flaky structures on the flower. 

While the wind was blowing one day I realized how perfect a companion they are to the cup plant. Both are almost as tall as one another, the flower color goes great, they're different enough to not be redundant, everything sounds perfect. I will certainly be planting some bulbs around this fall.