If you haven’t heard from me in a while, it’s not because I haven’t been writing my blog. It’s because my subscription email service Feedburner, which has send out my blog emails for the past 8 years, was finally closed down in mid-July by their owner Google. So I’m experimenting a little because I want you to receive my blog in your inbox, obviously, but I don’t want you to be bothered by advertising from commercial services.
In the meantime, I’ve been very busy – mostly keeping up with my year of fairy crowns. These are links to the blogs you’ve missed on www.thepaintboxgarden.com:
My 20th crown for August 19th had a sweet scent that was meant for the bees, not me, but I did appreciate the soft, vanilla perfume of the dusty-pink, hollow Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium fistulosum) that grows in the parts of my meadow that retain a little moisture. Along with it are the violet-purple flowers of New York ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis); the big, yellow daisies of cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum); the small yellow blossoms of grass-leaved goldenrod (Euthamia graminifolia); and a few sprigs of rough goldenrod (Solidago rugosa).
The plants I gathered came mostly from my west meadow…..
….. where the New York ironweed and Joe Pye weed make excellent companions, appreciating the tiny extra bit of moisture at the midpoint of our sloping property and maturing at about the same height, 2-3 m (6-9 ft), depending on the season.
I think I bought my first plant at a nursery, but New York ironweed has popped up on our property in soil that was brought in from neighbouring woodlands. Provided it can maintain fairly damp feet, it is happy in our sandy conditions.
Bees adore it, as do butterflies like the great spangled fritillary, below….
….. and the ruby-throated hummingbird is a fan, too.
One of my favourite photos was of a female goldenrod crab spider disguised as an ironweed stamen, just awaiting her unwary prey.
The hollow Joe Pye weed attracts lots of bumble bees. It’s much paler than its spotted (E. maculatum) cousin.
Grass-leaved or flat-topped goldenrod is not a true goldenrod in the Solidago genus, though it was considered part of the gang until recently. It is one of the late summer “weeds” on our property, including near our Waterloo Biofilter septic structure, below, where it definitely emitted a light floral perfume (that was not that of the septic system).
Bumble bees, such as the red-belted bumble bee (Bombus ternarius) below, and other bees seem to love it during its rather short blooming period.
Another abundant goldenrod that occurs naturally on our property is rough goldenrod (Solidago rugosa). Better behaved than its cousin, Canada goldenrod, it is nonetheless proficient at spreading itself around, much to the delight of all kinds of bees. This species gave rise to the popular garden cultivar ‘Fireworks’.
Finally, a few words about one of the tallest plants in my meadows, cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum). I was given my first tuberous roots of this northeast native by the gardeners at Toronto’s Spadina House Museum, with a warning that it would be invasive and I might be sorry I planted it. Fortunately, my meadows are filled with invasives and they all like to duke it out, so for the most part cup plant has been kept in check. Here it is at the base of our stairs.
My meadows are dry and sandy which also works against its invasive tendencies. But I saw it on a riverbank at the Chicago Botanic Garden, below, and I can say that it would be much more aggressive in the moist soil that it craves.
It’s a great favourite of bumble bees…..
….. and, occasionally, of passing butterflies.
I’ve made up a little video on my cottage cup plants, with a humorously surprising last scene;
Finally, here’s a little August bouquet from my meadows to you… until the next fairy crown.
Somehow, when I started writing professionally about gardens and plants way back in 1988 as my youngest child headed off to first grade, I did not think I’d still be as charmed by the Goddess Flora as I continue to be today. Especially given that my little first grader just turned 40 this spring and has a husband and three kids. Her three older brothers are in their 40s and 50s (the youngest gets married in Tuscany in exactly one month) and their mom – yes, me – is turning 75 today! When I was a young woman, I would have considered someone who’d reached my age as “elderly”. Funny thing – now I don’t! So Janet’s 19th fairy crown for August 10th is filled with fruitfulness – literally, the fruits and seeds of my meadows and wild places here at the cottage on Lake Muskoka and the fruits of a wonderful family life gathered over the past 45 years.
My family is very understanding: most have worn fairy crowns at one time or other. Here are my two older grandchildren getting their own custom crowns for my 74th birthday (photo by my son-in-law)…..
…… and posing with their younger brother, mom and me (aka “Nana”).
But it’s a longstanding tradition, even before I started my season-long parade of fairy crowns. Here’s my daughter 11 years ago with what we could find growing wild….
….. and my granddaughter with weedy bits from the front boulevard at their home, sweet violets and dandelions….
….. and my older grandson looking positively angelic.
My youngest grandson wore a happy smile when I asked him to pose with his crown.
As for my own crown, it represents a different way of gardening here at the cottage, one I intentionally chose to pursue twenty years ago. There would be some places (mostly on our steep hillside) for the wild plants of the forest, and wildish meadows where favourite perennials, mostly native, would be free to grow, wander and seed themselves. There would be NO WEEDING. So, woven within my crown are native fruits, including Allegheny blackberry (Rubus allegheniensis).
Down by the lake are black huckleberries (Gaylussacia baccata) which are a little seedy, but fun to eat in late summer. And they don’t suffer fruit loss in droughts like the wild lowbush blueberries on our property.
Though neither of the above grow in quantities sufficient to gather enough to bake more than a pie or a dozen muffins, it is rewarding to pick a handful and understand that these have grown by this lake and sustained native people here, as well as the local fauna, for hundreds or thousands of years.
Staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) is our most fruitful species, and I think its abundance is why I don’t suffer much deer damage to my “pretty” plants. White-tail deer love to browse on the branches and I see evidence of that all the way up our hillside.
Last summer, I even made a gin from my sumac blossoms. That’s it in the centre, flanked by blueberry and cranberry gins. I think in the final analysis it was my favourite flavour: a little bit lemony with something herbal as a side note. Unusual but tasty.
There are floral fruits in my birthday fairy crown too, including the pods of lupine, below….
….. and the dark fruit of blue false indigo (Baptisia australis), below….
….. and foxglove penstemon (P. digitalis), below. One of my very favourite plants for early summer – and a great bumble bee lure – it has very tough fruits, i.e. “capsules”, so when I harvest them after they’ve dried, I use pliers to crush them to avoid cutting my fingers.
Hiding in my crown is a little mushroom, but August is generally early for mushrooms on Lake Muskoka unless it’s a super-rainy month. However, give it a month or so and the mushroom show in this part of Ontario is spectacular. In fact, one year when we hosted our hiking group at the cottage, I hired a mushroom specialist to tour us around the forest. I think we found 38 species that day, using his keys.
There will be a little dock party today with relatives around the lake. Pretty sure there’ll be cupcakes, too and grandkids’ homemade gifts. And of course there are lots of flowers in bloom in the meadows and beds now and I will make sure we have some on hand as I turn… 75. I just need to get used to saying it. It shouldn’t be that hard, right?
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There were 18 fairy crowns before this one. Here they are!
My 18th fairy crown for August 7th features a strange, wild creature having a seriously bad hair day. All right…. it just contains a lot of spike flowers and I ran out of horizontal room on the tiara so it looks like I’ve endured a shock. These are flowers and leaves from my Toronto garden. The lavender-blue spikes are Russian sage (formerly Perovskia atriplicifolia, now called Salvia yangii after DNA analysis proved it was in the sage family). The fuzzy dark-mauve spikes are Liatris spicata ‘Kobold’, aka blazing star or gayfeather. The stem with wine-red leaves and flower clusters is Sedum ‘Vera Jameson’. The chartreuse flowers cascading over my forehead are Canada goldenrod (Solidago canadensis) – at least, a few stems that I didn’t tear out to try to prevent it from spreading (which it will do anyway). The dissected leaves come from my Tiger Eye sumac shrub (Rhus typhina ‘Bailtiger’) and the vine falling over my right shoulder is Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata). Those little, pale-pink bottlebrush flowers on my left cheek are ‘Pink Tanna’ burnet (Sanguisorba officinalis) at the end of its season. Finally, tucked into a corner on my forehead are a few red flowers of Petunia exserta that I forgot I’d thrown into my sundeck containers and they emerged in the midst of self-seeding oakleaf lettuce.
With its airy wands of long-lasting, light-blue flowers, the sub-shrub Russian sage is a big presence in my pollinator garden…..
…..and it offers nectar to bees for many weeks.
But it is sometimes short-lived and does not take kindly in our cold climate to being cut back in autumn. Much better to wait until spring when new growth has started.
It flowers at the same time as violet-purple dense blazing star (Liatris spicata ‘Kobold’)….
…. which is also a wonderful pollinator lure.
I adore the burnets and was able to source Sanguisorba officinalis ‘Pink Tanna’, which has interesting little “scrim” flowers. But I’m still on the lookout for the big, dark-red species which add such a zingy note to a meadow-style planting.
The Tiger Eyes sumac (Rhus typhina ‘Bailtiger’) is a favourite…..
…… and it retains its chartreuse colour well into summer, before turning a beautiful apricot in fall.
I forgive it its suckering-wandering ways because the birds absolutely adore it throughout winter.
As for the Boston ivy, well it’s pretty much a given in my garden… on my gate, below, and on my fence, and it would climb the house if I let it, but I don’t.
The little red petunias (P. exserta) were a seed-starting project a few years back and are quite rare and not found in garden centres. I wrote about them extensively in my 2020 blog My Motley Pots. This one managed to thrive in a container of self-seeding oakleaf lettuce on my deck.
As I wrote back then, my youngest son’s girlfriend Marta Motti did a painting of this petunia being visited by the hummingbird which she gave to me as a gift. I am delighted to say that she is marrying Jon on September 10th in Tuscany – and we will be there for the ceremony!
Sedum ‘Vera Jameson’ is in my backyard deck pots where it partners with the tough native grass sideoats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula). It’s very drought-resistant, given that these pots get watered very rarely, except by mother nature.
A few plants that are flowering now or in the next few weeks missed being in a fairy crown, so I’d like to say a few words about them now. The first is hoary or downy skullcap (Scutellaria incana), a native northeastern North America plant that I’m trialling in my front pollinator garden, where I’m hopeful it will be able to fend off the lily-of-the-valley groundcover.
Lastly, I’d like to give a nod to my favourite blazing star or gayfeather, Liatris aspera, aka rough blazing star. Though endangered, this is our regional native. Drought tolerant, it reaches 90-120 cm (3-4 feet) in height; it will start to flower in the next few weeks and is a superb, late-summer pollinator plant.
As for the Canada goldenrod….. well, it’s a useful weed but if you turn your back you’ll have a forest. So don’t turn your back!
This is truly my favourite time of year in the meadows at our cottage on Lake Muskoka. Why? Because the flower variety is at peak and the bees are at their most plentiful and buzzy. So my 17th fairy crown for August 5th celebrates the pollinator favourites here, including the champion, pink-flowered wild beebalm or bergamot (Monarda fistulosa), as well as yellow false oxeye (Heliopsis helianthoides), biennial blackeyed susan (Rudbeckia hirta), grey-headed coneflower (Ratibida pinnata) with its dark cones, mauve hoary vervain (Verbena stricta), oregano (Origanum vulgare) and a few of my weedy Queen Anne’s lace flowers (Dauca carota).
I call my wild places on either side of the cottage ‘Monarda Meadows’ because wild beebalm (M. fistulosa) is the principal perennial there and in all the beds and wild places around our house, where it grows as a companion to Heliopsis helianthoides, below.
There’s a reason wild beebalm is called that; it’s a literal balm for the bees, specifically bumble bees whose tongues can easily probe the florets!
Another frequent visitor to wild beebalm flowers is the clearwing hummingbird moth (Hemaris thysbe).
False oxeye (Heliopsis helianthoides) is one of the most aggressive natives I grow. I’m happy to leave it where it lands, but it often sulks in very sandy, sunny spots when summers are hot and dry. It’s much better in the rich soil at the bottom of my west meadow, and I try to ignore all the red aphids that line the stems in certain summers.
But heliopsis also attracts its share of native bees, including tiny Augochlora pura, below.
Unlike the blackeyed susan I wrote about in my last blog, R. fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’, the ones I have at the lake are all the drought-tolerant native Rudbeckia hirta, below, with a long-horned Melissodes bee. Biennials, they have seeded themselves around generously since 2003, when I first sowed masses of seed (along with red fescue grass) on the bare soil of the meadows surrounding our new house.
Sometimes they manage to arrange themselves very fetchingly, as with the perfumed Orienpet lily ‘Conca d’Or’, below.
Other times, they hang with the other tough native in my crown, hoary vervain (Verbena stricta). Both are happy in the driest places on our property where they flower for an exceedingly long time….
…… as you can see from this impromptu bouquet handful featuring the vervain with earlier bloomers, coreopsis, butterfly milkweed and oxeye daisy.
Bumble bees love Verbena stricta.
The other yellow daisy in flower now — hiding at the top of my fairy crown — is grey-headed coneflower (Ratibida pinnata), also a favourite of bumble bees and small native bees in the meadows. A vigorous self-seeder, it nevertheless does not always land in soil that is moisture-retentive enough for its needs; in that case, like heliopsis above, it wilts badly. But I love its tall stems bending like willows in the breeze.
Also in my fairy crown is a familiar hardy herb that fell from a pot on my deck long ago and found a happy spot in the garden bed below: Greek oregano (Origanum vulgare var. hirtum).
Its tiny flowers are also favoured by small pollinators.
The last component of my midsummer fairy crown is the common umbellifer Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota). As much as we think of this as an unwanted invasive weed in North America, it was reassuring to see a native potter wasp, Ancistrocerus, making use of its small flowers.
As always, my fairy crown has a lovely second act as a bouquet.
Finally, I made a 2-minute musical video that celebrates these plants that form such an important ecological chapter in my summer on Lake Muskoka.
