Butterfly Milkweed: PPA’s 2017 Plant of the Year!

Posted on August 31, 2016 by Janet

You know that feeling of pride you get when a friend receives a well-deserved award? I feel exactly that way about an outstanding prairie wildflower that I’ve been growing here in my meadows on Lake Muskoka for many years. So, when I heard that The Perennial Plant Association chose my very favourite perennial – butterfly milkweed, Asclepias tuberosa — to be their 2017 Plant of the Year, I decided to honour it with my own blog.

The PPA award is not the first laurel to be bestowed on this lovely wildling. In 2014, it was awarded the Freeman Medal by the Garden Clubs of America, as a native deserving of wider garden planting. And the GCA president asked me if I would donate my photo of a monarch butterfly on the flowers, below, which I was happy to do (see down this page).

Despite the plaudits, butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) is not the easiest perennial to grow, unless you happen to garden on a sand prairie. It has a deep tap root that makes it rather difficult to transplant. And seeds are often notoriously slow to germinate and grow, sometimes taking 5 years to grow enough to set flower buds. But give it a little rich, free-draining, gravelly soil and lots of sunshine, and watch the pollinating insects pile on. Foremost, of course, is the beautiful monarch butterfly, which uses it – as it does all milkweed species – as food for its caterpillars. If you’re lucky, you might see the female monarch ovipositing on its leaves or flowers.

Come back and you’ll see the little egg on a leaf….

… or perhaps right in the flowers.

Follow along over the next few weeks and you’ll see the various instars of the developing caterpillar munching away on the leaves….

…. and the flower buds.

But monarchs aren’t the only butterflies fond of butterfly milkweed. Many others love the nectar-rich flowers, including the great spangled fritillary…

…. hairstreaks, below, and many others.

Bees love it too. On my property, I often see the orange-belted bumble bee (Bombus ternarius) nectaring….

….and the brown-belted bumble bee (Bombus griseocollis), too.

Here’s a little video I made of the brown-belted bumble bee foraging on my butterfly milkweed. In the background, you can hear a red squirrel scolding and a lovely Swainson’s thrush singing its flute-like song.

Naturally, many native bees seek nectar from butterfly milkweed. I’ve seen long-horned (Melissodes) bees….

…. and tiny, green sweat bees (Auguchlora pura), all enjoying the flowers.

Honey bees are avid foragers, too.

Seek doctor’s advice before thinking to act.* If you want to get treated for alcohol addiction or drug abuse, you can get effective treatment in these rehab cheap cialis 5mg centers. Precautions This drug ought to be generic cialis in canada used by an impotence victim not by anyone else, not even a disorder. This process accentuates the production of contractile proteins which are used to make your muscle contract more forcefully, as well as structural proteins that are present sildenafil generico online naturally in the body. Human growth hormone or HGH is a hormone controlled canada tadalafil djpaulkom.tv by your pituitary gland. Okay, you get the picture. This is one superb pollinator plant! But how should one grow it, and with what companions? I have grown it in both reasonably rich, sandy soil, and very dry, lean, sandy soil, and I can attest that it prefers more moisture than other prairie plants, such as gaillardia and coreopsis. This is what it looked like near my septic system this July. I managed to keep it watered by running two hoses up the hill behind my cottage, but it was a struggle until a few rains came.

However, if summer rains are abundant, it’s happy with those more drought-tolerant natives. Here it is growing very wild in dry soil with Coreopsis lanceolata.

And it does well in fairly dry conditions with Anthemis tinctoria.

On the other hand, it does well in reasonably rich soil with my Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’, where I can run the hose if rains don’t come (like this summer)…..

…. and peeking up through my grassy monarda meadow, near a lush pink lily.

I’ve grown it with Penstemon barbatus ‘Coccineus’….

…and with blackeyed susans (Rudbeckia hirta).

And I’ve seen it looking pretty with daylilies and catmint in a friend’s garden, too.

Butterfly milkweed’s blooming season is so long, it counts numerous July and August plants as companions. Here is a bouquet I photographed on July 17th, 2010 with blackeyed susans (Rudbeckia hirta), false oxeye (Heliopsis helianthoides), veronica (Veronica spicata ‘Darwin’s Blue’) and blue vervain (Verbena hastata).

… and a collection of little bouquets I made on August 16th, 2013.

If you want to know absolutely everything that might flower at the same time, here’s a montage I made one year on July 7th, 2014. Yes, that’s butterfly milkweed near the lower right corner. See if you can guess the rest!

I have planted dozens of young butterfly milkweed plants here at Lake Muskoka over the years, like these ones offered by the Canadian Wildlife Federation (along with suitable nectar plants), as an encouragement to ‘bring back the monarch butterfly’. Most took, provided I irrigated them for the first summer; a few didn’t.

But I have also managed to grow many from seed, which is harvested from the typical milkweed fruit capsule. The ones that were most successful were those I guerilla-sowed, using the toe of my boot to kick them in along the edge of a gritty, community pathway midway down the hillside on a neighbour’s property. Under that granitic gravel, below, there was actually rich sandy soil and adequate moisture, given that the path sits mid-slope on the hill. But this tough environment best replicates the natural ‘sand prairie’ that butterfly milkweed likes.

You can also buy a seed mix in multiple colours: ‘Gay Butterflies Mix’, below.

Want to try your hand sowing butterfly milkweed? Follow these seeding instructions in a propagation guide in the Minnesota newsletter of Wild Ones: “Collect when pods are cracked open. Remove down; cold stratify in fridge in damp sand for 90 days. Broadcast on soil surface in spring when soil is warm.”

Best of luck growing this worthy award winner! You and the pollinators – including the lovely monarch butterfly – are worth the effort.

Black for Garden Drama

Posted on August 29, 2016 by Janet

Late August brings us into the dog days of summer, and there’s nothing that cures a dog day like a dose of drama. That’s why I reserved this month for BLACK! (And thanks to a little summer travel, I’m just getting in under the August wire.)

Of course, no plant leaf or flower is completely black. Inspected closely, there is always green (for photosynthesis) or dark red, purple or deep bronze underlying the apparent dark floral pigments. But there’s a rich roster of plants that can be called upon to inject a little black magic into the garden, whether it’s with dark-as-night foliage or betwitchingly black blossoms. And for my money, no one offers up the design potential of black like Vancouver’s Van Dusen Botanical Garden. Here’s their black and gold border, with barberries, colocasias, sedums, eucomis and black mondo grass, to name just a few. Isn’t it lovely? And doesn’t that dark foliage look spectacular paired with chartreuse?

Here’s a closer look at a portion of Van Dusen’s wonderful border, with a black taro, ‘Black Tropicanna’ (or perhaps ‘Australia) canna and ‘Brunette’ snakeroot (Actaea racemosa ‘Brunette’).

Mondo grass (Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’) is one of the darkest ‘black’ leafed plants, and one of the most dramatic for pairing with bright colours. I love the way Victoria’s Horticulture Centre of the Pacific uses it in combination with Sedum ruprestre ‘Angelina’, seen below in spring when it’s still gold.

Here’s how it looks at HCP with golden oregano (Origanum vulgare ‘Aureum’).

At gorgeous Chanticleer Gardens in Wayne, Pennsylvania, the Japanese Garden employs Japanese black mondo grass as a dark edging under bamboo ‘fencing’.

Other dark, grass-like plants include fountain grass, particularly Pennisetum ‘Princess Caroline’ and ‘Vertigo’, below, shown with orange zinnias at New York’s Conservatory Garden in Central Park.

And here is Pennisetum ‘Princess Caroline’ doubling down on black with the ornamental pepper Capsicum annuum ‘Black Pearl’, a fabulous black annual.

Black and red look spectacular together, too, as demonstrated by Capsicum annuum ‘Black Pearl’ paired with annual red Salvia splendens.

The best spring bulb for injecting a little early-season black is Tulipa ‘Queen of Night’. I love this one, and use it liberally in my own spring garden. Here it is at Toronto’s Casa Loma bringing depth to citrus colours….

…. and at Toronto’s Spadina House as a pretty partner to pink….

…. and echoing the dark foliage of ‘Diabolo’ ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius) at the Toronto Botanical Garden.

Shortly after the tulip season comes columbine season, and there’s nothing more dramatic than a black, pleated form of Aquilegia vulgaris.

One of my favourite dark-leafed shrubs is Black Lace elderberry (Sambucus nigra ‘Eva’), seen below with a pink Phlox paniculata at Northwest Garden Nursery in Eugene, Oregon.

For some reason, annual sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas) lends itself genetically to black colouration. Here is ‘Ace of Spades’ with yellow rieger begonias in Toronto gardener Shari Ezyk’s lovely urn.

And adding a dark carpet to sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) at the Conservatory Garden, in New York.

This is the fancy-leafed ‘Blackie’, with ‘Lemon Gem’ marigolds at Toronto Botanical.

Another species that has benefited ‘darkly’ from plant breeding is tropical taro or elephant ears (Colocasia esculenta). Here we see the big leaves of ‘Royal Hawaiian Black Coral’ exploding with a canna lily out of a sea of chartreuse foliage at Montreal Botanical Garden.

Black taros are also used beautifully with other tropicals at Nancy Goodwin’s Montrose Garden in Hillsborough, North Carolina.

There are some good black petunias, including yellow-striped ‘Phantom’.

Sometimes we forget that seedheads can have visual impact in a late-season garden, especially when they’re as dark as Rudbeckia maxima, shown in front of Calamagrostis acutiflora at Wave Hill in the Bronx.

Purple coneflower has dark seedheads, too. Here it is behind the golden fall foliage of Amsonia tabernaemontana in autumn.

And don’t forget the zingy seedhead possibilities of blackeyed susans!

We can also add black with furnishings, of course. Here’s a modern black steel fence I fell in love with at the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York.

And this black-stained garden arch is the height of design sophistication (as are black fences).

Black chairs? What about using some black stain and artistic flourish to turn a Muskoka (Adirondack) chair into a work of art, as my artist son Jon Davis did for me many years ago.

Even a simple black bistro chair can up the dark drama quotient, especially if it’s in renowned garden guru Tom Hobb’s former Vancouver garden.

In the black accessories department, you can’t go wrong with a simple black obelisk, especially when it chums with a pink daylily.

Moving to containers, black adds a dollop of sophistication via this beautiful trio of planters at Toronto Botanical Garden. No other colour would work as well with the flamenco-red flowers and foliage, all designed by horticulturist Paul Zammit.

I’ve written about Paul’s creative container designs before, but he does have a special skill for knowing just what to use, like these kitchen herbs (parsley, sage), grasses (carex, hakonechloa) and orange calibrachoas in a run of basic black iron window boxes.

I’ll finish my contemplation of black in the garden with containers from my favourite public garden, Chanticleer. Here’s a lovely black urn that repeats the black-red theme of some of the photos above, with red calibrachoa. Stunning, isn’t it?

And finally, a half-dozen statuesque black planters that are as much about defining space in this Chanticleer garden, as they are containing plants.

August in New York’s Conservatory Garden

Posted on August 28, 2016 by Janet

It was a steaming hot August afternoon in New York City. I’d arrived just hours before from Toronto with three days of area garden viewing and photography on my agenda. I hadn’t made plans for today, but then I remembered a city garden I hadn’t visited for more than a decade. There were still hours of daylight, albeit crushingly humid hours with temperatures in the mid-90s. So I filled my water bottle, slung my camera bag over my shoulder and headed out of my hotel (Hotel Boutique at Grand Central), conveniently located near Grand Central Station and the 42^nd Street Subway. The subway tunnel felt like a tropical jungle, but it was nothing compared to the inside of the subway car heading north, whose air-conditioning was broken. “59-68-77-86”, I counted down the stations, fanning myself madly and hoping I wouldn’t faint before arriving at my stop. When I climbed the stairs to 96^th Street (the dividing line between Manhattan’s Upper East Side to the south and Spanish Harlem to the north), the humidity was even higher. I’d only walked a block or two westward towards Central Park before the first fat raindrops fell. Fortunately, I’d tucked my umbrella into my bag and as the rain became a torrent, I pulled my camera bag closer to me and hurried on. By the time I’d crossed Fifth Avenue and walked north along the park to 105^th, people were running out and taking shelter under trees or dashing along the sidewalk to their cars or buses. I, on the other hand, was heading into the park, and as I entered the Conservatory Garden through the Vanderbilt Gate, the rain magically abated and the lawns and hedges steamed in the late day heat. Ahead of me was the formal Italianate garden with its lush lawn and fountain. In May, those crabapple trees on the sides are fluffy clouds of pink and the pergola in the distance is wreathed in wisteria.

I watched a young girl playing in the fountain’s cooling spray.

The Italianate garden is in the middle, one of three sections that make up the 6-acre Conservatory Garden, which is named for the lavish greenhouse that occupied the site from 1899 to 1934, before it was officially opened as a garden in 1937. After the second world war, the garden was increasingly neglected; by the 1970s it was a derelict place Under Central Park Administrator Elizabeth Barlow Rogers and renowned New York designer and public gardens champion Lynden Miller (who also did Bryant Park and numerous other urban spaces), the gardens were completely renovated and reopened in 1987.

At the north end is the French garden….

.. with its low broderie parterres….

… and the Untermyer Fountain, “Three Dancing Maidens”, a 1947 donation to Central Park from the children of famed New York lawyer Samuel Untermyer, whose Yonkers estate is now a conservancy open to the public.

But as a plant-lover, I was interested in revisiting the southernmost section, the English Garden. To get there I walked past the perimeter of the French garden, with its crabapple allées. A few visitors took shelter from the last raindrops under their umbrella.

I passed a raised garden filled with a tapestry-like assortment of luscious tropicals.

Then I was walking into the English Garden under a magnificent sourwood tree (Oxydendrum arboreum), its tiny, pendulous, white blossoms alive with bumble bees. Trees, shrubs and various perennials act as leafy enclosure in the outer beds in the concentric arrangement of hedge-backed plantings in Lynden Miller’s original design. The current curator of the English garden is Diane Schaub, whose talent is very much on display here. (See note at bottom of my blog).

Below is one of Lynden Miller’s favourite shrubs: oak-leaf hydrangea (Hydrangea quercifolia), as the big panicles take on their tawny autumn hues.

The outer bed below features Japanese anemones (Anemone x hybrida), an August mainstay, with cascading Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola’) in the foreground. Mid-border is another Lynden Miller trademark: a clipped purple barberry globe (Berberis thunbergii), adding a sculpted architectural note. (One of my favourite photos from a visit here in the 1990s was one of these globes graced with deep-violet Clematis durandii.)

Here is a closeup of Japanese anemone with the delicate flowers of Thalictrum rochebrunianum.

White coneflowers (Echinacea) brighten the shade-dappled outer bed under the trees. There’s a lovely colour echo of the cones with the dark foliage of the black bugbane beside it (Actaea racemosa Atropurpurea Group).

Post-rain, the subtle baby-powder fragrance of summer phlox (Phlox paniculata) and the perfume of hosta flowers wafted in the enclosed spaces in the garden.

But as lovely as the mixed perennial-shrub beds were in the outer rings, it was the inner hedged beds in the English Garden that beckoned me. They offered a master class in the use of annuals and tropicals to create exquisite designs that can be changed every year. But these aren’t your grandma’s annuals; there are no impatiens, geraniums or petunias in the garden. Instead, you see statuesque plants in lovely colour combinations that rival any perennial border. The bed below offered fabulous ideas for combining chartreuse foliage with oranges and bronzes.

Here’s a closer look at the inspired pairing of Cuphea ‘David Verity’ — one of many ‘zing’ plants — with a charteuse colocasia.

Who could dislike stiff, old canna lilies when they do THIS in the late afternoon sun? (Especially when paired with bronze fennel flowers and a luscious azure-blue Salvia guaranitica.)

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Tender grasses add a punch of colour, too. Below is Pennisetum setaceum ‘Fireworks’.

Hedges of Japanese holly (Ilex crenata) and euonymus act as a permanent framework in the inner rings, and both sides are planted with annuals in classic colour combinations. The bed below…….

…..featured a lovely pairing of chartreuse ‘Gay’s Delight’ coleus (Plectranthus scutellarioides) and purple Verbena bonariensis — another good ‘zing’ plant.

Deep burgundy-blacks — like Dahlia ‘Mystic Illusion’, front, and the grass Pennisetum ‘Vertigo’, below — added depth to a dark-foliage border.

Exploring all the inner beds was a challenge. Just when I thought I’d seen them all, I’d turn a corner and spot something entirely new! I loved the way this heuchera (maybe ‘Black Taffeta’?) anchored the design below.

In some hands, pink flowers can be just too cotton-candy sweet. But Diane Schaub used a deft touch, below, to incorporate the pink spires of Agastache cana ‘Heather Queen’ and the zingy pom-poms of Gomphrena ‘Fireworks’ and purple Verbena bonariensis into a pale-green matrix of tropical plants, including variegated Furcraea foetida ‘Mediopicta’, centre, and variegated plectranthus (P. forsteri ‘Green on Green’), right.

Stronger pinks like the verbena, below, were partnered with darker greens, like Colocasia esculenta ‘Blue Hawaii’.

I loved the combination, below, of Gomphrena ‘Fireworks’ and blue pitcher sage (Salvia azurea). Such good clear colours.

Sometimes horns would honk nearby and I would be reminded that I was in a leafy enclave a stone’s throw from one of the most famous streets in the world: Fifth Avenue!

Unusual annual pairings were everywhere. Below is Perilla frutescens with airy Ammi visnaga ‘Green Mist’.

And I adored this vignette of magenta-pink Gomphrena ‘Fireworks’ with lacy centaurea, a deep-red salvia and coleus.

I was very impressed with the way tropical shrub Tibouchina urvilleana, below, was used in the purple border. It looked perfectly at home with magenta Gomphrena globosa and dark pink zinnias.

Finally, that concentric maze of flowery beds led me to the intimate centre of the English Garden, with its enclosing borders and a pink-flowered crepe myrtle (Lagerstromeia indica). Benches were arranged so visitors could…….

…. relax and enjoy an intimate view of the Burnett Memorial Fountain, the centrepiece of the English Garden. Sculpted in 1936-7 by Bessie Vonnoh (1872-1955), it honours children’s book author Frances Eliza Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) and depicts the children Mary and Dickons from her classic Secret Garden.

I paused for a moment in the secret garden, but towering storm clouds were building in the sky to the west and it was time to head back to my hotel.

I bade farewell to this lovely secret garden and strolled out to catch a southbound bus to midtown. What a lovely first evening for my short New York stay.

** Thanks to my online friend Marie Viljoen (66 Square Feet) for her 2015 Gardenista article on the English Garden, which provided a few of the plant names for my photos above.

The Artful Garden

Posted on August 5, 2016 by Janet

For 19 years, Suzann and Jon Partridge have turned their beautiful country property near Bracebridge, Ontario into an outdoor gallery featuring the garden-inspired art of dozens of talented Ontario artists.

Welcome to the Artful Garden, with the 2016 show running from July 23^rd through August 14^th.

It is a generous gesture from these accomplished and well-known potters, who met in art class at high school in Toronto more than 45 years ago.

Jon’s pottery is in collections throughout the world.

Though the show started almost two decades ago, it was 1974 when the young couple moved to what was then a neglected 100-acre Muskoka farm. Their house is modest and typical of the old brick farmhouses that dot Ontario. It’s also visitors’ introduction to the Artful Garden, which I have been photographing through the years. (Note: Some photos below are from my previous visits.)

Suzanne has worked tirelessly developing her gorgeous gardens, which now total more than a dozen areas. They feature sun-loving perennials like blazing star, left (Liatris spicata) and daylilies.

…and purple coneflower…

….and hostas for her shady corners….

… and vines like the honeysuckle that climbs an arch in June….

…and beautiful annuals in windowboxes.

There are vegetables and herbs….

….a pond….

and several pottery fountains.

Jon & Suzann share their property with a chocolate Lab…

…a gaggle of specialty fowl that roam freely throughout the gardens…..

…and loads of butterflies and bees, like this honey bee nectaraing on the common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca)….

…. in the huge field adjacent to the garden. On busy Artful Garden days, some of the other neighbouring fields are conscripted for parking.

There’s also a summer arts camp for kids, and on the day I was there this week, they were making delightful fresh floral ‘paintings’.

Suzann is especially skilled at knowing exactly which little corner will make the perfect vignette for the art displayed for three weeks each summer, like Laura Moore’s artistic rendition of a virus, set in verbena and osteospermum.

And Mark Clark’s “happy pills’, in a carpet of calendula.

Here are bulrushes in echinacea, courtesy of metal artist Lino Barbosa.

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