This didn’t start out to be a blog. This morning I was uploading grasses & sedges to my online stock library of plant images when I came to the genus Carex. It’s a very slow process, keywording and uploading, squeezed in between the rest of life. Last winter, I managed to get Cacti and Succulents and Ferns and Cycads uploaded; this year I’m hoping to complete Grasses and Bulbs.
As I uploaded photos of Carex buchanani, leatherleaf sedge or Buchanan’s sedge from New Zealand, I recalled fondly the year I grew it in the pots on my lower deck in Toronto. It was 2013 and the containers are the double-walled resin pots I’ve had for two decades. In British Columbia leatherleaf sedge would be perennial but in my Toronto garden—and especially in exposed pots – it’s an annual. As I looked at photos from that year, it occurred to me that ornamental grasses don’t always get their due as hardworking container plants. As a compulsive chronicler, I had photos from the week I planted it until the very end of the year (which featured a disastrous weather event in the city’s history). I thought you might enjoy browsing through six months in the life of Carex buchananii, the leatherleaf sedge. First of all, let’s raise a glass (grass?) to John Buchanan (1819-1898), Scots-born New Zealand botanist and draughtsman and author of the 3-volume folio The Indigenous Grasses of New Zealand for whom leatherleaf sedge is named.
June 1 – Now let’s look back at the spring of 2013. I planted the six pots at the end of May, and this is what they looked like on June 1st. Carex buchananii was in the centre with an assortment of fancy-leaf pelargoniums and orange Calibrachoa and dusky-hued sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas) surrounding them.
June 12 – By now, my neighbour’s beauty bush (Kolkwitzia amabilis) was in full bloom and the deck pots were filling out a little.
June 21 – On the summer solstice, my deck garden down the stairs from the containers was frothy with Clematis recta ‘Purpurea’….
…… and the leatherleaf sedge was fountaining as the pelargoniums grew bigger.
July 4 – Now summer was here and the fancy-leaf pelargoniums sported flowers. My favourite is the red-splashed, chartreuse cultivar ‘Indian Dunes’.
July 22 – A few weeks later, my patio edging of hostas was in flower and the last few annoying, invasive tawny daylilies were still blooming.
August 7 – This would have been peak flowering for the containers, which now showed the lovely effect of the bronze grasses and the colour echoes of the splashes on the pelargoniums……
…… while the sweet potato vines trailed ebulliently over the pot edges. But as a gardener who goes away to a lake north of the city all summer long, this array of containers relied on my husband’s regular watering. Within a few years, he’d be working at the lake, then fully retired (which he did last December). The pots would, in time, need some rethinking.
October 8 – With the cooler temperatures of autumn, flowering had now slowed on the annual flowers but the grasses continued to look good.
October 21 – See that azure-blue in the background, below? My garden is filled with fall monkshood (Aconitum carmichaelii ‘Arendsii’) and it shines between Canadian Thanksgiving and Remembrance Day, one of the latest perennials to flower. And the Tiger Eye sumac (Rhus typhina ‘Bailtiger’) in the rear that was bright chartreuse all summer now turned bright apricot-orange.
Here’s a closer view of the pots with the sedge even richer in colour. I loved this combination of bold fall hues.
November 9 – By the beginning of November, there’d been a hard frost and the pelargoniums had died. But the grasses still looked good – because it’s hard to tell a dead carex from a live one, as the saying goes…..
November 16 – After cleaning out dead annuals, I added cut conifer boughs and Southern magnolia (M. grandiflora) for the holiday season and (hopefully) all winter. The leatherleaf sedge added some needed texture.
November 27 – Snow came early in 2013 and provided an apt illustration of why Canadians from the prairie provinces eastward smile when they hear the phrase “winter garden”.
Well, the holly looked good anyway.
December 22 – On the night of December 21, 2013, freezing rain began to fall on Toronto, lasting for hours and leaving behind ice-coated trees and shrubs, downed wires and a city without electrical power, in places for several days. Winter was so cold that year, there were shady areas in my garden where flagstones were still icy in late March! But my winter pots and the leatherleaf sedge looked quite beautiful, in a crystalline way.
Had the leatherleaf sedge not already died, the ice storm was the nail in the coffin. But I had enjoyed those textural sedges-with-edges for six full months.
EPILOGUE:
The deck pots have always been both fun and a challenge to plant up each spring, especially considering the summer watering issue. Below are a few of the other years. And they haven’t always held grasses.
2010 – I’ve always loved pelargoniums in bright, Mediterranean hues, and this year I combined them with the newly popular ‘Margarita’ sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas) for eye-popping effect. The pond garden looked quite…. tame… that year. And I hadn’t yet planted the Tiger Eye sumac in the background.
2011- The next year, I switched up the sweet potato vine in the pots for gold oregano (Origanum vulgare ‘Aureum’) but it wasn’t nearly as vigorous and turned plain green by midsummer, as many chartreuse-leafed plants do.
2014 – The spring after the leatherleaf sedge saga above, I had just been to California and was wowed by the orange Anagallis hybrid ‘Wildcat Mandarin’ in the Santa Barbara area. I decided to go all out and plant it in the pots with ‘Red Rooster’ leatherleaf sedge (Carex buchananii) and burgundy and chartreuse foliage accents, but my California dreaming simply didn’t pan out for a summer’s worth of bloom (at least with an absentee gardener). You win some, you lose some…..
2015 – This was the year I decided to stop buying expensive annuals and try to perennialize the pots. Good plan. My mistake was doing it with expensive heucheras. All summer, they looked understatedly beautiful with their jewel-like leaves, especially perked up with a reprise of the sedge and apricot-orange Calibrachoas. But not one heuchera survived a Toronto winter. Fail.
2016 – I decided to get serious about keeping plants alive two years ago, and invested in the ultra-hardy native grass sideoats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula). Since it grows alongside railroad tracks on the Canadian prairies, I knew that would be a good bet. Harder to gauge was the likelihood that the pink sedums I selected to accompany the grass would be happy year-round in a container. I seeded in some orange nasturtiums so as not to be too tasteful with the pinks…..
….. and by late summer, the deepening colours of the sedums echoed beautifully the plum foliage of the alternate-leafed dogwood (Cornus alternifolia) at the back of the garden. And I liked the zing-zing of the grass!
2017 – Success! Everything lived through winter and by July, the sideoats grama was filling out nicely. But was it filling out a little toooooo much? Could the sedums survive a prairie grass?
The sedums did their pink thing in September.
By October 21st, everything was still alive, but a little underwhelming in the looks department. Ah well, I hadn’t spent a penny on plants and the grasses looked absolutely fabulous as the autumn winds blew them around.
2018 – This year I added some seeds of Viscaria oculata ‘Blue Angel’ to bare spots in the containers in early spring and I think every seed germinated (I removed some and took them to the cottage on Lake Muskoka). I thought it would be fun to end this blog with a video I made of the deck containers on a cicada-buzzy, bird-chirpy August day.
Last week, I performed what has become for me a ‘rite of November’: cutting down the meadows at our cottage on Lake Muskoka, a few hours north of Toronto. I have to admit, it isn’t my favourite chore of the year, though I acknowledge I don’t actually have a lot of “chores” up there, given the naturalistic way I garden. But it’s definitely the most labour-intensive – amidst the least pleasant weather conditions of autumn, as it usually turns out. This year it was blowing a gale as I assembled my wardrobe and tools: hedge shears, rake, cart, bundling cloth and ropes, rubber boots, extra layers under my waterproof jacket and fleece band to keep my ears warm. I started out with the big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii), the tallest of my prairie grasses, at 7 feet with its turkey-foot flowers. Considering it’s growing in shallow soil atop the ancient rock of the Canadian Precambrian shield, rather than the deep loam of the tallgrass prairie where its roots can extend far down, I think it’s rather happy at the cottage, and I took a selfie of us together before I chopped off its head!
Since my meadows and beds likely measure only about 1600 square feet or so, it’s not a lot to hand-cut with the hedge shears. People wonder why I don’t use a string trimmer, but I find that holding the weight of a trimmer just above ground is harder on my back than bending over and chopping the stems manually. I understand you can buy a harness for the trimmer, so that might be an improvement – but there’s something hypnotically satisfying about working with the shears.
As I work, I rake and pile the stems into windrows near the cart where I’ll eventually pack them up into bundles to carry by hand up the hill behind the cottage to a place out of sight where they can break down. It’s important to leave some strong stems standing up to 12-18 inches (30-45 cm) so native ‘pith-nesting’ bees find them in order to lay their eggs.
If I don’t cut the meadows, the heavy snows of winter will soon bend down the grasses and forb stems, but the thatch that accumulates makes it less attractive for self-seeding wildflowers and daffodils emerging in spring. So if I want the scene below in mid-summer, it pays to prepare for it by cutting old growth.
And if I leave the switch grass (Panicum virgatum) standing after it turns colour in fall….
…. it will look like this in May.
So I remove all the above ground growth in November.
And if I’m travelling during this late autumn window (as we have on a few occasions), the daffodils will still come up in the meadow the following spring, but it’s a bit of a struggle.
In short, if I want this…..
…I have to do this.
And if I want this…..
….I have to do this.
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I could hold off on the cutting until late winter or very early spring, when the ground is still frozen (as I do in my city meadow), but timing doesn’t always work that well up here and a fast thaw means I’m cutting on mucky soil. And since most of the seed-eating birds have flown south and those that remain seem adept at picking up seed from the ground, I’m happy to clear out this…..
…. in order to enjoy this next summer.
Beyond the chores of this month, I love the varied browns of November. I’ve even blogged about Beguiling Brown in the Garden. And I enjoy inspecting all the seedheads as the plants complete their life cycles. Plants like showy goldenrod (Solidago speciosa), its white panicled seedheads shown below alongside the charcoal autumn foliage of false indigo (Baptisia australis). (Incidentally, though these plants flower at the opposite ends of summer, they’re among the best for bumble bee foraging.)
Here is the candelabra-like seedhead of culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum) with the ubiquitous button-like seedheads of wild beebalm (Monarda fistulosa).
Those seedheads above, of course, are proof that the attractive summer flowers, shown below, attracted the pollination services of the appropriate wild bees.
And the late summer-autumn season has also allowed the various grasses to shine, below, including – apart from the big bluestem – Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans) and switch grass (Panicum virgatum).
November is the perfect time for dormant seeding native wildflowers, so as I’m chopping the stems, I also do some fast sowing into the meadows, using my boot toe to kick little bare spots into the soil, then grinding some of the seeds just below the surface, while leaving others exposed. I do this with New York ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis), below.
Chopping, raking, piling, carrying. Chopping, raking, piling, carrying. After a good day-and-a-half in blustery wind and intermittent cold rain, I manage to take 8 tied bundles of stems up the back hill to a spot on top of the pile of blast rock that was cleared when we built our home here on this waterbound peninsula 16 years ago. In time, the vegetation will decompose amidst the staghorn sumac pioneers and create a more complex meadow planting here.
Finally, as I finish washing out the cart, coiling the garden hoses, cleaning my tools, bringing everything indoors and preparing to drive back to the city in the waning light of the third day, I gather up a handful of the stems I’ve put aside in my cutting. Because apart from enjoying vases filled with summer flowers in July…..
….. it feels virtuous, somehow, to accord these plants the same respect in November.
To capture a little of the atmosphere of what it’s like to perform this task in November, I’ve made a short video to enjoy here. (Please excuse the wind – it was impossible to find quiet moments.) The good news? My back and I are still on speaking terms!
What a luscious October afternoon! I looked out my back window and was drawn, as I always am this time in autumn, to the furthest corner of the garden, where a little fall scene unfolds that I treasure more because it’s a secret. Want to see it? Let’s take a little stroll past the messy pots on the deck with their various sedums and swishing sideoats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula) out into the garden past the table and chairs that haven’t been used since… when? August?
Keep going to where the lovely chartreuse Tiger Eyes sumac (Rhus typhina ‘Bailtiger’) is currently doing its Hollywood star thing in brilliant apricot…..
But what’s this scene, just behind it?
Yes, two stalwarts of the autumn garden – and I mean autumn, fall, October! Autumn monkshood (Aconitum carmichaelii ‘Arendsii’) and autumn snakeroot (Actaea simplex), aka fall bugbane. Each year, they flower at the same time, and enjoy identical conditions in my garden, i.e. the most moisture-retentive soil (lowest corner of the garden by a few inches), with reasonable midday sunshine but dappled shade a good portion of the day. The fragrance of the snakeroot is fabulous, something a little soft and incense-like, or reminiscent of talcum powder (in the nicest way). Colour-wise, I love blue and white, from the earliest anemones-with-scilla in April to this shimmering, assertive finale.
And did I mention pollinators? As in bumble bees of different species, honey bees……
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(WHO has the beehives near my house? I’d love to know)…..
……hover flies…..
….and paper wasps, below, as well as ants and cucumber beetles.
Monkshood is deadly poisonous, but its pollen seems to be an attraction for bumble bees and honey bees once the asters have finished up.
Finally, do note that the snakeroot is not any of those fancy-schmancy dark-leaved cultivars like ‘Brunette’, but the straight species with plain-Jane-green-foliage,. And that it used to be called Cimicifuga, but the gene sequencers have now moved it into Actaea. It is a lovely plant and should be used much, much more.
Gardening in cottage country. Ah, the whispering white pines, the towering red oaks and sugar maples, the lacy hemlocks, the shimmering trilliums… and the pee-gee hydrangeas?
It is a strange paradox that when people head to their summer retreats in Muskoka, Georgian Bay or the Kawartha Lakes (or any other wilderness area), they often feel the need to recreate the type of manicured city landscape they left behind – one that fails to capture the unique sense of place inherent in the spectacular, rugged terrain of cottage country. After all, don’t we seek escape to a granite island or forested shoreline in order to appreciate nature in the wild, not to subdue it with our own sense of urban decorum?
But when that decorum includes a Kentucky bluegrass lawn sweeping down to the lake’s edge, one that needs fertilizing to stay green and mowing and edging to stay neat, it seems to me that we have not only turned our backs on the notion of wildness, but threatened it as well. We should all be aware by now that fertilizer runoff has a harmful effect on water quality, increasing the phosphorus levels, encouraging the growth of algae and adversely affecting the shoreline habitat for fish. But apart from the environmental effect of a lakeside lawn, the idea of having to replicate the humdrum chores of an urban back yard at a place where you should be snoozing in a hammock, reading the latest bestseller, and kicking off your summer sandals just seems wrong.
Of course, the ideal cottage landscape is the one that’s been altered the least, the one that retains the native low-bush blueberries, blackberry, black chokeberry, wild raspberry, bearberry, myrtleberry and sand cherry, below.
It’s the landscape that respects the bush honeysuckle, the creeping dogbane, white meadowsweet and common juniper, while rejoicing in the mayflower, wild strawberry, violet, Solomon’s seal, trout lily, trilliums and red columbine.
It appreciates the bracken and marginal shield ferns in the dry places, the cinnamon and royal ferns in the damp spots and the sensitive fern and lady fern in the shady forest. It’s the one where children and grandchildren run down paths carpeted with pine needles; where the shore is edged with white turtlehead, blue flag iris and swamp milkweed, below.
The place where wild goldenrod and an assortment of asters offer up an easy bouquet for the Thanksgiving table. And it does all this under trees that grow in familiar communities – red maple, white pine, beech, red oak, paper birch, hemlock, moose maple, staghorn sumac and trembling aspen – while giving shelter to songbirds, chattering jays, chickadees, barred owls and woodpeckers.
Gardening Between a Rock and a Hard Place
But what if leaving the cottage landscape au naturel is not an option? Construction doesn’t always leave the land in pristine condition, and sometimes a cottage property has been “tamed” by the people who owned it before you came on the scene. What then? For me, it was necessary to come up with a fast landscape plan after we built our Lake Muskoka home in 2001-02, a construction project that left the sloping bedrock exposed and barren of vegetation. But perhaps I should back up a little here.
Our south-facing property was the driest, hottest patch of land on a little peninsula jutting out into a small bay on the southeast part of Lake Muskoka. Except for a row of towering, white pines at the shore – survivors of a fire that razed parts of the peninsula ridge decades earlier – and some red oaks here and there, the vegetation was scrubby, its growth constrained by shallow, acidic, sandy soil formed from the granite and grey gneiss rock underlying much of the region. Sloping on a moderate angle to the lake, it was a challenging site for construction of a four-season house big enough to accommodate children, friends and far-flung relatives for family reunions. With no road access, all supplies arrived by barge, including the concrete truck that poured the foundation, massive steel beams, roof trusses, lumber, appliances and furniture.
When all was finished, we were delighted with the cottage (that’s the rustic euphemism we assign to homes of any size on Lake Muskoka); the views were spectacular from all sides and a screened porch extended the hours we could be outdoors dining and reading. But our ecological footprint had not been light. Much of the bedrock on either side of the site had been scraped bare of vegetation by tractors and line-trenchers. Worse, the front of the cottage dropped away sharply onto sloping granite, making exiting the doors on the lower level to reach the lake a treacherous exercise.
My objective in landscaping was not simply to re-green the site, but to re-shape the contour of the land, adding a front plateau to let us safely access the hillside. It would feature a new woodchip path to replace the path that meandered across the property long before we built there. We would also need stairs leading to the lake and dock, and I played with various concepts, below, as we worked on the house.
But beyond the structural changes, I wanted to return our land to a richer, more complex diversity than it possessed before we began to build. I knew that the pines and oaks would eventually re-colonize the property, along with blueberries, junipers and sumacs. In the meantime, there would be years of vibrant sunshine to nourish whatever I chose for my palette. And even as I transplanted tiny pine saplings, I began to dream about those wild, flower-spangled meadows I had grown up with as a child in Victoria,
It wasn’t just a desire to naturalize an already natural site that appealed to me. I was also pushing back against the way I’d been gardening in the city, rebelling against the need for constraint and order that comes with beds and borders and neatly-mown lawns. It made no sense to think that way about a cottage landscape; not only would it be out-of-step with the natural environment, it would be out-of-synch with how I had changed, physically and philosophically, as a gardener. More and more, I wanted a landscape that was not just for me and my kind, but one that would appeal to other species: the bees, katydids, butterflies, birds and chipmunks that would soon call the meadows home. I also wanted that sense of aesthetic pleasure that comes from observing a truly changing canvas with a roster of plants to provide a shifting tapestry from April to October. Most of all, I wanted my meadows to be low-maintenance.
After the last of the construction equipment was removed from the site, a barge arrived loaded with a tractor and different kinds of soil. For the most conventional garden beds – the spaces between the four doors on the lower level – rich triple-mix consisting of equal parts of loam, peat and manure was chosen. For the open meadows on either side of the cottage and the sunny hillsides in front of them, we settled for a local, low-grade, sandy soil, emulating the environment found in natural sand prairies. On the steep bank dropping from the newly-shaped path under the old white pines in front of the cottage, we elected to spread a locally-sourced forest soil called “trimmings” that contained the roots and seeds of whatever might be found naturally growing in similar conditions nearby.
My objective that first summer was to prevent the new soil from washing down the slope in rainstorms. As a fast-germinating cover crop, I seeded the meadows and hillsides with a combination of creeping red fescue grass (Festuca rubra) and black-eyed susans (Rudbeckia hirta), mixing about 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of the wildflowers into 4.5 kilos (10 pounds) of grass seed. A few weeks and many hours of hand-watering later…..
….the first blades of grass emerged, followed closely by the first tiny leaves of countless blackeyed susans.
A biennial, it makes a rosette of foliage in its first season and sends up flower stems the following summer, before setting seed and dying. I still laugh at the photos taken of me in year two standing amidst thousands of cheerful black-eyed susans.
Into the rich soil of the doorway garden beds went big golden yarrow (Achillea filipendulina ‘Gold Plate’), Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia) and switch grass (Panicum virgatum). This is how the path and a doorway bed looked a few years later.
At the base of the richest meadow, I planted an assortment of prairie grasses, including big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii), little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium),Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans) and switch grass (Panicum virgatum), below. And over the next few years, I did an autumn sowing of seeds of a roster of tallgrass prairie perennials that would become the flowery backbone of the meadows: foxglove penstemon, heliopsis, monarda, gaillardia, sweet blackeyed susan, gray-headed coneflower, asters and showy goldenrod to add to goldenrods already on the property. That plants were native was not as important to me as their drought-tolerance, a vital attribute for a landscape that would rely on rainwater — while acknowledging that dry summers would take their toll on plants growing in shallow soil.
The Meadows Mature
Now, fifteen years later, my meadows and garden beds provide a bounty of flowers (and beautiful bouquets). There is something in bloom from the first daffodils of April…..
…. to the last goldenrod and asters of autumn. This is showy goldenrod (Solidago speciosa), down by the lake in late September.
Monarch butterflies lay eggs on the butterfly milkweed….
….producing beautiful caterpillars and a new generation of the iconic butterfly…..
….which, when it prepares to fly south to Mexico in early September, sometimes stops on our dock to soak up a little salt from the feet of sunbathers.
Myriad pollinating insects and hummingbirds visit the flowers, like this ruby-throated female on my crocosmia flowers (which, amazingly, have overwintered for years)….
…while goldfinches enjoy the monarda seeds….
…..and ruffed grouse are regularly spotted in late summer wandering through my meadows.
Though there are a few deer on our peninsula, they seem to prefer the young sumac shoots to my perennials….
….. but groundhogs enjoy purple coneflower and coreopsis from time to time.
In truth, the meadows are so profuse that I am happy to share a few plants. Yes, there are exotics some might call “weeds”, e.g. oxeye daisies, buttercups. birdsfoot trefoil, musk mallow, cow vetch, hawkweed and quackgrass, but they are kept in check by the vigorous prairie plants.
The only work required is to use a trimmer twice each season to keep the path across the property clear.
In November, I need to cut down the meadow grasses to reduce the thatch that builds up and to keep things neat for the daffodils that emerge each April. And, of course, to prevent the meadow from transitioning naturally to bush, it’s necessary to keep out any blackberries and sumacs that might want to jump the path from the steep slope to the lake.
My cottage neighbours know where to find a bouquet of fragrant daffodils in springtime.
The bumble bees know where to find beebalm with sweet nectar.
And I know where to find photographic inspiration and beauty all season long, like this single day, July 7, 2013, when I collected all these flowers at the cottage.
Let’s take a little tour of the property.
A Tour of My Muskoka Garden Today
Coming down the stairs from the cottage, we see the little patch of wildness I call the “east meadow”. The soil here is shallow and the plants — tall cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum) at the bottom of the stairs and beebalm (Monarda fistulosa) and false oxeye (Heliopsis helianthoides) in the meadows — tend to suffer in a dry summer. On this side of the stairs is a large stand of Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’ and other plants.
Here’s the view of the cottage through the beebalm and heliopsis in the east meadow.
Here’s the stairway to the lake, below, with a little viewing deck part-way down. The slope, composed of soil called ‘trimmings’, features plants native to Muskoka, including sumac (Rhus typhina), meadowsweet (Spiraea latifolia), common juniper (Juniperus communis) and wild blackberry (Rubus allegheniensis). Oaks and maples sprout on the slope as well; some are encouraged but it’s necessary to thin the forest a little here.
In early summer, that little section below the bench is a lovely confection of foxglove penstemon (P. digitalis) and lanceleaf coreopsis (C. lanceolata). Both of these native perennials share a love of dry, gravelly soil.
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Here’s a short video of foxglove penstemon at the lake shore.
On a grassy part of the slope to the lake, I combine butterfly milkweed with blackeyed susans.
Looking west down the path past the scented ‘Conca d’Or’ lily (one of the strongest Orienpet or Oriental x Trumpet hybrids), it’s amazing to me that this flat terrace was created from a once steep and treacherous slope.
Moving along the path, the bed (using the word ‘bed’ very loosely) at the eastern end of the cottage is filled with more fragrant Orienpet lilies. Over the years, I’ve discovered that certain perennials exhibit good drought-tolerance, like Veronica spicata ‘Darwin’s Blue’, just finishing below. This bed also contains English lavender (Lavandula angustifolia), ‘Walker’s Low’ catmint (Nepeta racemosa) and ‘May Night’ meadow sage (Salvia nemorosa).
The most satisfying garden section at the cottage has been the small, sloping west meadow, aka the ‘monarda meadow’ for its predominant wild beebalm, Monarda fistulosa. This is how it looks today,as the large prairie grasses at right are just beginning to fountain.
In early August the west meadow features some good perennial partners with the monarda, including ‘Gold Plate’ yarrow (Achillea filipendulina)….
…. gray-headed coneflower (Ratibida pinnata)….
…. and false oxyeye (Heliopsis helianthoides)…..
In June, the monarda meadow features the odd wild lupine (Lupinus perennis), now less populous than they were a few years ago, when their blue candles glowed in the grasses.
I made a little time capsule video to remember my meadows this week, in a summer when rain was plentiful (to say the least) and the flowers all reached for the sky.
Bouquets from the Meadows
The cottage beds and meadows have yielded lovely bouquets for the table, whether in June with the lupines, false indigo (Baptisia australis), oxyeye daisies (Leucanthemum vulgare) and large-flowered penstemon (P. grandiflorus)…
….or later in summer, with cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum), gray-headed coneflower (Ratibida pinnata), blue Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia), purple blazing star (Liatris spicata) and the many goldenrods (Solidago sp.) that flower at the cottage.
Sometimes I add stems of Allegheny blackberry (Rubus allegeniensis) and nannyberry (Viburnum lentago) to the summer wildflowers, like the little nosegays below.
20 Great Cottage Perennials for Bees & Butterflies
Except for the fragrant lilies, which are just for me, my criterion for including plants to the cottage beds and meadows is that they must be useful to foraging insects and birds. Here are twenty of the best:
1. Blue false indigo (Baptisia australis) – Ironclad, low-maintenance native perennial attracts bumble bees at a critical time in late spring when bumble bees are provisioning their nests.
2, Wild lupine (Lupinus perennis) – Bumble bees are the pollinators for this native perennial, which flowers in June.
3. Blackeyed susan – Rudbeckia hirta – Lots of small native bees and butterflies enjoy foraging on biennial blackeyed susans.
4. Blanket flower – Gaillardia x grandiflora – Provided it’s regularly deadheaded, blanket flower will bloom until autumn, attracting myriad bees.
5. Catmint – Nepeta racemosa ‘Walker’s Low’ – Long-flowering and a bee magnet, catmint has aromatic foliage that discourages deer.
6. Lanceleaf coreopsis (C. lanceolata) – One of the easiest, most drought-tolerant perennials for early summer, this coreopsis attracts lots of bees and its seeds attract hungry goldfinches.
7. Foxglove penstemon (P. digitalis) – Another easy, adaptable native perennial, this penstemon flowers at the same time as coreopsis, above, and enjoys the same rugged conditions – dry, gravelly soil. Bumble bees forage on it extensively.
8. Hoary vervain (Verbena stricta) – This vervain epitomizes “hardy and drought-tolerant” and is the most foolproof perennial in my dry meadows. Guaranteed to bloom and attract bumble bees.
9. False oxeye (Heliopsis helianthoides) – In the ‘be careful what you wish for’ category, this one is easy from seed and likes to take over the meadow. A negative is its attraction to rosy-apple (red) aphids, but lots of native pollinators enjoy the flowers, including the wasp below.
10. Wild beebalm (Monarda fistulosa) – Easily the most valuable perennial in my meadows, attracting bumble bees, hummingbirds and the lovely clearwing hummingbird moth, below.
Bumble bees are plentiful in my meadows during the blooming period of the wild beebalm. This is my west meadow today, August 7, 2017.
11. Butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) – I have blogged at length about this plant, named the Perennial Plant Association’s 2017 Plant of the Year. It attracts many types of pollinators, including the monarch butterfly, which lays its eggs on the plant to be foraged by the developing caterpillar.
Butterfly milkweed is also very popular with bumble bees of all kinds. Here’s a video I made of a bumble bee nectaring while a red squirrel scolds and a Swainson’s thrush sings in the background.
12. Gray-headed coneflower (Ratibida pinnata) – With its willowy stems, this perennial is the most graceful in my meadows, and attracts small native bees.
13. Cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum) – The tallest of my meadow perennials, this one is a colonizer, but so popular with bumble bees that it can be forgiven for laying claim to as much territory as it can.
I was surprised one year to see which animal was snacking on the 8-foot tall seedheads of my cup plant. Not a deer, but a…….
14. Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia) – Hardy with aromatic leaves that repel deer, this sub-shrub is an excellent companion for big golden yarrow. Bumble bees and honey bees adore the tiny, lavender-purple flowers.
15. Blazing Star or Gayfeather (Liatris – many species, esp. L. ligulistylis, below, and L. spicata) – I adore all the blazing stars, and so do the butterflies. Rocky Mountain blazing star, below, is particularly popular with monarch butterflies and with the great spangled fritillary shown.
16. Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum) – Preferring more moisture than many of the prairie natives, this tall perennial (the one below is the cultivar ‘Fascination’) is a magnet for bees and butterflies.
17. New York ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis) – Wherever there’s an extra bit of moisture, this tall ironweed thrives in late summer. It attracts bees and many types of butterfly, including the painted lady, below.
18. Sweet blackeyed susan (Rudbeckia subtomentosa) – A tall, easy-going perennial – and my favourite of the rudbeckia clan, this late-summer beauty attracts its share of native bees and wasps.
19. Goldenrod (Solidago sp.) – There are at least a half-dozen species of goldenrod that thrive on our property. Some are invasive enough to be nuisances, like Canada goldenrod (Solidago canadensis). Others are rare enough to be prized, like Solidago nemoralis. But my favourite is one I seeded myself, showy goldenrod, Solidago speciosa, below. One of the latest-blooming perennials, it is often in flower well into October, nourishing the last of the bumble bees before our long Muskoka winter.
20. New England aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae) – At the very end of the season, around Thanksgiving time in Canada, the various asters provide a late, vital source of nectar for all the bees.
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Adapted from a story that appeared originally in Trellis, the magazine of the Toronto Botanical Garden.
Come along with me on a little tour of my garden in mid-May! I’ve meant to do this for several years, and this is the perfect week, since the cool weather up til today has kept everything looking good. Not just that, but I splurged last autumn and bought quite a few spring bulbs from my pal Caroline de Vries, who owns FlowerBulbsRUs in Mississauga, Ontario. And my pal Sara Katz planted most of them. But for some reason, loads of my old tulips seem to have multiplied this spring, adding to the party. Let’s start in my front garden. Isn’t this fun? Though I’ve picked a lot of pinks and oranges, that luscious, black ‘Queen of Night’ is absolutely essential to make this garden ‘zing’.
Here’s a closer look, with the creamy fothergilla shrub and dainty ‘Thalia’ daffodils.
Study the first two photos and you’ll see that my spring bulbs emerge in a sea of green foliage. While a front garden full of invasive, agressive lily-of-the-valley might provide a beautiful, fragrant background for all these bright hues, it’s definitely not recommended as a design tool. Nevertheless, if you happened to read last spring’s blog about how to make a fresh-picked lily-of-the-valley hat, you’ll know that I’ve done my best to come to terms with these perfumed thugs.
I love finding pretty groupings to photograph, like the one below. And that dusty-rose tulip is a bit of a mystery. It might have been mislabelled – I didn’t order it – but it looks like ‘Champagne Diamond’.
It’s pretty gorgeous, whatever it is…..
I have nine Fothergilla gardenii plants in amongst the spring bulbs. Their foliage turns spectacular colours in autumn.
Here are some of my favourite tulips. Let’s start with an oldie, ‘Perestroika’. This tall, late-flowered cottage tulip has multiplied over the years.
And ‘Carnaval de Nice’ has stuck around pretty well, too.
This is ‘Crispion Sweet’ – isn’t it lovely?
‘Rococo’ is a luscious parrot tulip – and parrots are usually divas when it comes to longevity. But I planted these several years ago.
Here’s the lovely, late tulip ‘Dordogne’, below right, with ‘Queen of Night’.
There are loads of daffodils in the front garden as well. I decided to stick with white to cool down this hot-coloured scheme, so there’s a combination of ‘Thalia’ with (below) pure white ‘Stainless’ and orange-centred, spicily-perfumed ‘Geranium’.
The Back Yard
I have more spring happening in the back garden, so let’s head there. It might be fun for you to see it from my bedroom window. That big cloud of white in the centre is Malus ‘Red Jade’, my lovely weeping crabapple planted over the little pond.
If we head down to the deck, you get the view below. That’s fragrant snowball viburnum (V. x carlcephalum) right in front of the deck, just about to open its incredibly-perfumed flower clusters. The garden was designed to flow from the deck to the dining patio, which makes summer entertaining fun.
This is a closer view of ‘Red Jade’. It’s an alternate-bearer, meaning every other year it puts on a great show like this, followed by masses of tiny red fruit. It flowers very sparsely in the ‘off’ years.
Here’s a view of the back of the house, from under the crabapple.
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I’ve had the pagoda lantern for a long time. Though this little garden isn’t classically Japanese, it had a bit of that feel, so I though the lantern worked with the pond.
I love this fresh combination in the lily pond garden, underplanted with self-seeded forget-me-nots (Myosotis sylvatica). Later, there is magenta phlox here.
The back garden is on the north side of the house, so it’s shadier. The tulips in my west border here tend to be surrounded by ostrich ferns, which would fill the entire garden if I let them.
This is ‘Mona Lisa’ – isn’t she lovely?
‘Ballade’ is one of my favourite tulips – a very good perennializer.
‘Texas Flame’ is no shrinking violet (!) and though I started with eight or so, I still have one or two that return each spring.
If I ever knew the name of the orange beauty below, I’ve forgotten it.
Same with this lovely, lily-flowered tulip…. maybe ‘Jacqueline’?
Native Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica) bloom in the ferns with the late tulips.
Where it’s sunnier, in the front as well as the back, there is elegant camassia (C. leichtlinii).
In my west side garden, Burkwood’s viburnum (V. x burkwoodii) is filled with fragrant blooms this year.
To access my east side garden, there’s a gate from the driveway fitted with a rusty, old heating grate. Have a peek down the path…..
Let’s go in and walk down it If you look back, you can see the gate. See the arched stems of Solomon’s seal (Polygonatum biflorum)? They’re one of my favourite natives and so easy to grow. That’s European ginger (Asarum europeaeum) at the base of the black walnut tree.
There are bleeding hearts in this pathway, too.
So that’s my garden in mid-May! I’ll leave you with this little video of my 2-year-old grandson Oliver, who enjoyed “tiptoeing through the tulips” in a thunderstorm a few days ago. Toddlers and tulips….. time is fleeting, and I’ve learned to enjoy them both for the short time they’re around!
