Aster patens

Right now the roadsides in our area are blooming with the late purple aster, Aster patens.  I think I have identified this aster properly, although as you can see the color of the blossoms is NOT deep blue violet. The crooked stem aster, Aster prenanthoides, has the more accurate ‘pale violet’ flowers, but not the crooked stem or teeth on the leaves. Can anyone give me a better ID?

Thank you Gail at Clay and Limestone for hosting Wildflower Wednesday.

Ice Wings daffodil?

There are lots of daffodils in bloom right now. I must have at least eight varieties in various shades of yellow and white, but I will let this one stand in for all the rest. I think it is Ice Wings and it is the most unusual of my collection. If it is Ice Wings it is a tazetta. The daffodils grow in the lawn and you can see the hawkweeds budding up.

Primroses

I love the yellow primroses that has been blooming in this weedy spot under the trees near our blueberry patch for probably 20 years, ever since I stuck the pot that I bought at the supermarket in the ground.

Cherry blossoms

We planted this sour cherry tree years ago.  I love cherry pie.  But we never get the berries, the birds do.

There are thickets of wild cherry trees around the hen house. When I look from a distance they are not impressive, and when I look up close they are just beautiful.

Cotoneaster

Last year for the first time the cotoneaster bloomed.  Or at least I noticed it for the first time. The blossoms are quite quince-like.

Muscari

Three blooms in one photo.  Muscari or grape hyacinths growing in the lawn, as well as dandelions, of course, and if you look very carefully in the top left corner, a yellow daffodil.

Bluets

We’ve been planting our windbreak and saw the first clump of bluets just starting to bloom.  These must be a wildflower, surely.

Viburnam

The vibrunams growing in our woods where they can get a few rays of sun have started blooming.  Can I call this plant a wildflower, too?  They seem to grow wild in the local woods.

There are other plants blooming, white and purple violets in the lawn as well as ground ivy, johnny jump-ups, sweet violets (not the lawn kind)-  and the lilacs have fat buds, but no bloom yet.

Thank you Carol for inventing this wonderful way for us all to keep a good bloom record of our gardens, and for making it possible to visit the blooms in gardens across the country. Click here to visit Bloom Day at May Dreams Gardens.

Trout lilies

This patch of trout lilies, Erythronium americanum, is growing by the roadside on the edge of a drainage in the woods near my house. Trout lilies are so called because the mottled leaves are thought to resemble the markings on brook trout, but it has other common names: adder’s tongue because of the look of the new unfurling leaves, and dogtooth violet because of the appearance of the white corm, but, of course, it is not a violet at all.

Erythronium americanum, trout lily

Trout lilies can join other spring ephemerals like bloodroot in the garden. They like fertile moist soil and enough sun in the spring to warm the soil in the spring, but shade throughout the rest of the year when they will have dried up and disappeared. They spread most reliably by creating new corms: while they may form a good sized colony they are not at all invasive. If you buy potted plants in the spring for your garden make sure they are nursery-propagated because native wildflowers are under siege everywhere.

I have so little shade in my garden that I really love finding wildflowers in my local ‘wilderness.’

Coltsfoot

Gail of Clay and Limestone is celebrating wildflowers this week and I wanted to get in on the fun. Fortunately I have one wildflower in bloom here at the End of the Road, coltsfoot, coughwort or Tussilago farfara. I usually call it an ‘herb’ because of its medicinal uses. Its leaves are used in an infusion or to smoke, in both cases to cure a cough.  Of course the word ‘herb’ in its broadest sense means only a plant that dies down to the ground in the fall or winter.

A wildflower is one that grows without cultivation, and that is how I found my coltsfoot, growing wild by the side of my road.   It is not a native American plant, but once here it became known for growing in moist, gravelly soils.  That describes the roadsides in my town, including the road that ends at our house. Coltsfoot looks like a little dandelion, but blooms earlier than dandelions. Also the bloom appears before the foliage, large leaves that are often described as looking like a horse’s hoof, or at least the hoof of a colt.  It often appears where the soil has been disturbed, like the roadsides, and sends out runners.  Last year I moved a couple of coltsfoot plants to the northern side of the Rose Bank and it has spread. I hope it will make a sufficiently vigorous ground cover that it will choke out any undesirable weeds.

Nasami Farm in Whately

Nasami Farm in Whately, the nursery of the New England Wildflower Society, will open for the season tomorrow, Thursday, April 14.  Hours are 10 am to 5 pm from Thursday through Sunday every week.The Nursery offers about 400 nursery propagated native wildflowers and shrubs.

Barren Strawberry on May 11, 2010

I go every year to buy groundcovers like barren strawberry and shrubs like Rosa setigera.

Rosa setigera

What will you need from Nasami this spring?

Zebra Longwing Butterfly

Butterfly gardening is becoming very popular. Schools are having their students plant butterfly gardens, and adults can find more than a dozen books devoted to gardening in a way that will attract butterflies to their landscape.

Butterfly gardening could just as well go by another name, pollinator gardening.  Everyone knows that bees are pollinators, but butterflies along with many other creatures like wasps and bats are important pollinators. Planting a butterfly garden helps support pollinators.

Most of us do not give much thought to pollination, except possibly in the spring when we see honey bee hives being moved into local fruit orchards to insure good fruit set. Yet the reality is that every third bite of food we take is due to the work of a pollinator. Wheat, corn and rice depend on the wind for pollination but most other food crops depend on animal pollinators, bees, wasps and other insects, bats, butterflies, moths and hummingbirds to produce fruit and seeds.

One of the threats to pollinators are the insecticides and herbicides that are routinely used in agriculture.  When we grow our gardens, including lawns and flower gardens without these poisons we are protecting pollinators and our food supply that is dependent on them.

The New England Wildflower Society, which has its headquarters in Framingham and operates both The Garden in the Woods, and the Nasami Farm nursery in Whately, is drawing attention to the importance of pollinators with a competition – Native Buzz: Creative Container Gardening for Pollinators.

This competition has three categories: for youth up to age 17; for amateurs including groups like a garden club; and professionals. Application forms and a separate document with full guidelines are available online at www.newfs.org/visit/events.

“The intent of this exhibit is to explore the many and varied ways a container gardener can attract pollinators using native plants in unique and creative containers. Containers can be large (no larger than 3’ x 3’), small, whimsical, colorful . . . as long as they serve the needs of our native pollinators well.”

This is the first time the Wildflower Society has offered the public the opportunity to create an exhibit. Get ready to do some research and creative planting because applications are due on April 15.

The application requires a description of the container or group of containers (taking up no more than 3’ x3’ of space), and a list of the pollinators to be attracted and fed. The forms asks, “How will you accomplish that goal? What steps will you take to attract pollinators over the 11 week period of the Native Buzz exhibit.”  If you are going to list the pollinators you want to attract, you need to have a list of  the native plants that attract them. That means research, especially since it  sounds like you need to keep attracting pollinators for 11 weeks.

Applicants will have to think about what kind of site the container will require, sun, shade, or part shade, as well as arrange with a park or other public site to accept the container once the exhibit at The Garden in the Woods ends on August 31. I’ll bet the Energy Park would love such a container planting.

On May 1 the Society will announce 15 winners, five in each of the three categories. At that point, the winners will be able to refine their design because on May 1 a full list of  plants will be available from Nasami.  All plants must come from Nasami, and the winner can choose plants for their container with a retail value of up to $300 at no cost.

This exhibit requires some real skull-work and creativity. Whether or not a applicant is chosen as a final exhibitor, I think applicants will have a whole new appreciation for the process of pollination. There is a lot of information about pollinators on the Internet about which pollinators pollinate which plants on Wikipedia and from the U.S. Department of Agriculture at http://www.ars.usda.gov/Services/docs.htm?docid=1279.

For those who like turning to books, The Pollinator Conservation Handbook: A Guide to Understanding, Protecting and Providing Habitat for Native Pollinator Insects by Shepard, Buchmann, Vaughan and Black may give you the information you will need.

Another book that might be useful is The Forgotten Pollinators by Buchmann and Nabhan. Don’t forget to check your library for these books. Both are intended for a general audience.

Even if we are not interested in making a pollinator container we can encourage pollinators in our gardens. I have bee balm planted in the Herb Garden in front of the house. From our windows we can watch bees, hummingbirds and those funny little hummingbird hawk moths sipping at the blossoms and carrying away pollen. Actually, from a distance we can’t see the pollen work, but we know they are doing it.

Other plants for the pollinator garden include asters, foxglove, Echinacea, helenium, joe pye weed, sumac, salvia, elderberry and serviceberry. It is very easy to invite and sustain pollinators in our garden, while creating beauty, and fruitfulness in our vegetable gardens.

Between the Rows  March 19, 2011

Commonweeder logo

When I began my blog, slightly more than three years ago, I had just finished reading The Uncommon Reader, a delightful short comic novel by Alan Bennett.  I am a reader and understood the reference to Virginia Woolf’s Common Reader essays so the phrase ‘common reader’ was whirling around in my brain  when I thought of that most common of weeds – the dandelion.  I thought the dandelion was a perfect flower to refer to me; I am a Leo and those distinctive leaves are the dent de lion, the teeth of the lion, and I am a cheerful person, and though no one has ever used the term sunny to describe me, I love the sunny shaggy dandelion flowers.  What else could I name my blog but The Commonweeder.

Yesterday I spent an hour with my friend Cara Hochhalter, and she helped me make a block print of a dandelion that I will use as a logo.  I am not an artist, but I am very happy with the way this turned out, needing only a bit more tweaking of the block, and figuring out how to make the blossom a tiny bit bolder.  What do you think?

I used a Safety-Kut soft printing block from Daniel Smith which made the task much easier and faster.

Johnny Jump Ups 12-2-10

Yesterday I was visiting Sue Reed, author of the excellent Energy Wise Landscape Design, to talk about her book and our local landscape.  You will be hearing more about our talk soon.  Before I left we walked around the house to see how she had edited and added to the elements of her own landscape. More on that later, too.  As we came around the southern corner of the house we saw this energetic bunch of Johnny Jump Ups still in bloom. Sometimes we overestimate the length of winter. It hasn’t begun yet if you ask these johnnies.

Katrina, I don’t have much blooming on my windowsill, but I just had to post about these brave johnnies.  To see what else is blooming logon to Roses and Stuff.

Northern Sea Oats in my Garden

The November/December issue of The American Gardener: The Magazine of the American Horticultural Society arrived the other day. As I was browsing through it last night I was surprised, but thrilled, to see Ellen Sousa, who lives in Central Massachusetts, quoted in Kris Wetherbee’s article Garden Cleanup Reconsidered.  Ellen’s own landscape is not only a Certified Wildlife Habitat, it is a Monarch Waystation so it was no surprise to hear her say, “instead of doing the traditional fall scalping of perennial beds, we leave tall plants such as coneflowers,  agastache, asters and ornamental grasses standing right through the winter. Their seeds feed overwintering birds such as juncos, chickadees, and song sparows when snow has buried most other natural food sources.”

Happily for me I discovered Ellen, garden coach, teacher, and writer when I first began blogging. I recommend the New England Natural Habitat Gardening blog to everyone, and now I am looking forward to her book The New England Natural Habitat Garden which will be out next year. Not so very far away.

Ellen also writes for the group blog, Beautiful Wildlife Garden, with some of my other favorite bloggers, Gail Eichelberger, Barbara Pintozzi and Helen Yoest, all of whom I got to meet in Buffalo this summer! Hooray for the Garden Bloggers Meet-up.

Bee Balm (Monarda)

I wasn’t going to miss another Three for Thursday hosted by Cindy over at My Corner of Katy. Right now I have three pink natives blooming in my garden.  I might be stretching a point to all this bee balm pink, but it is not brilliant scarlet so I am including it.  Bee balm, Monarda, is native to North America as are the other two pinks in my garden. Bee balm is in my herb garden in front of the house even though I do not use it medicinally or in tea - although I could.  It is sometimes called Oswego tea

Echinacea

Echinacea is credited with being the most used herbal plant in the world. It is considered an immuno-booster. My husband takes echinacea capsules whenever he feels a cold coming on. I do not harvest any part of my echinacea for medicinal purposes. I’m happy to let it bloom in the garden and let the birds eat the seeds.

Chelone obliqua

Pink turtlehead is another late blooming native. It is pollinated by bumblebees and I was very amused to watch the bees on this clump searching for blossoms that they could enter and harvest nectar. When they find a suitable blossom they are almost entirely hidden by the petals. My clump is about three feet tall and very healthy, even with this dry summer.