Our newest garden, the Native Plant Garden is a 3.5-acre notebook of ideas for your home garden. Native shrubs—like the ones you will see here—are an asset to any landscape, as many of them are durable plants which serve as homes and food for native bird species. Native shrubs often have beautiful spring or summer flowers and colorful fall foliage.
Deciduous winterberry hollies, Ilex verticillata, a standard in the nursery trade, are indigenous from Nova Scotia through Florida and west to Missouri. In their native habitat they prefer moist soils and swampy areas where they tend to sucker. However they will still grow prodigiously in average garden soil, but with a more upright form that can tolerate full sun and light shade.
These hollies are dioecious meaning there are male and female flowers on separate plants. The females are covered with berries later in the season. The male, meanwhile, can be tucked back in a corner. The bright-colored berries, technically drupes, are often red, but can vary from scarlet to orange-yellow, and are eaten later in the winter by over-wintering birds. They are too hard for migratory species which mean they hang on into the winter when they can nourish the birds toughing out the winter, hence the name “winterberry.”
Tours will focus on the diversity of plants to be found in the garden and the birds that are already calling it home. Everyone is encouraged to borrow a palette and watercolors and let the Native Plant Garden inspire you or your children to create a masterpiece en plein air. Enjoy folk tunes and bluegrass from the very popular Milton. Shop for native plants and learn from the experts in a series of demos and author book signings.
There’s so much to do in the Native Plant Garden you might be inclined to just stay there and enjoy this beautiful new landscape, but you would be missing out on a wealth of other stunning vistas! Though there are only a few blooms, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden is once again open for the season, and just above it you will find blooming tree peonies and fragrant stands of lilac. In the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden, Mario Batali’s Kitchen Gardens have just been planted, and every child is encouraged to plant and play in the rest of the garden beds. In Cherry Valley a few tenacious blooms hold on, while tulips are everywhere in the Perennial Garden, Home Gardening Center, and along Seasonal Walk. In the Herb Garden you will be greeted by a “theater” of adorable and fascinating auricula primroses. The Azalea Garden is just beginning to glow in rosy hues of magenta, shocking pink, and seashell blush. Along Daffodil Hill the daffs are fading a bit, only to be outshone by gorgeous (and fragrant) crabapples. Basically, everywhere you turn there’s another stunning vista!
The Native Plant Garden‘s transformation over the last two weeks has put up a spectacle, for sure, but when I ran into Ivo yesterday, he only had eyes for these tiny “pantaloons.” And if his love of these Dutchman’s Breeches didn’t get the point across, his bright orange shirt laid his national pride out for anyone within a mile to see.
Dutchman’s Breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) — Photo by Ivo M. Vermeulen
I was out in the woodland area of our soon-to-open Native Plant Garden and found myself overwhelmed by the beauty of all the different species of trillium we have planted there. Trilliums bloom in early spring, taking advantage of the time on the forest floor before the trees grow leaves and cast shade upon them. Trilliums, much as their name might suggest operate in threes: three leaves, three sepals, and three petals. The leaves are arranged in whorls wrapping around the stem from a single point. The result is a graceful zygomatic symmetry. Triullums are undoubtedly one of the most showy and elegant trichotomous woodland native plants.
There are two types of trillium, sessile and pedunculate. The flowers of sessile trilliums rest on the leaves without a flower stalk while pedunculate trillium flowers are elevated by a stalk. Sessile trillium tend to have mottled leaves that are spotted with silver or maroon coloring while pedunculate trillium have green foliage. Trilliums are slow to grow on their knobby rhizomes, but will slowly spread and form a nice clump, though it may take up to seven years before they flower if you plant them from seed. But, the pay-off is that once a clump is established in your garden it will live for decades.
A plant of Virginia spring beauty showing its grass-like leaves.
Of the many spring ephemerals cropping up in the Garden, the plant known as “spring beauty” in the genus Claytonia is one that can be seen without taking a walk through the woods. It is commonly found at the edge of woodlands, or along mowed roadsides. Like many spring ephemerals spring beauty flowers close at night and remain closed on overcast days. This tendency, combined with the plant’s grass-like leaves, make it easy to miss spring beauty if you do not look closely.
The beauty of spring beauty is best enjoyed by looking closely at the flowers with a hand lens. This allows you to appreciate the delicate pink lines that lead insect visitors to the source of nectar at the base of each petal. Insects–among them small bees, flies, and wasps–are further guided to the nectaries by a bright yellow spot; they are attracted by both nectar and pollen. The tiny flowers do not produce enough nectar to warrant a visit by the large queen bumblebees that fly in early spring, but small bees drink their fill and pack their pollen baskets with the anthers‘ creamy white pollen. The anthers themselves are pink and open before the female reproductive parts, thus helping to promote cross-pollination.
An underground rhizome of bloodroot cut to show the bright red sap.
Both the scientific name, Sanguinaria canadensis, and the common name, bloodroot, of this spring wildflower are descriptive. The generic name Sanguinaria has its roots in the Latin word for blood, and bloodroot describes the root-like rhizome of this plant, which contains a bright red sap. Like other members of the poppy family, Papaveraceae, the sap throughout the plant is colored, which may be seen by breaking a vein in the leaf with your fingernail.
What’s in a name? Ask dogtooth and bloodroot. Together they kind of sound like the beginning of a Shakespearean curse or insult, no? And yet, they’re such beautiful ephemeral spring wildflowers!
Last week I announced that spring is here and the weather promptly rose into the 70s for three days. I watched everything unfurl, some early bloomers senesced, and then we had a welcome day of rain which supplied good moisture to get even more things jumping.
We are heading into the season where the Garden changes dramatically every week. This morning I walked out to the Azalea Garden and admired the early season blooms in their full glory. The Korean rhododendron Rhododendron mucronulatum, ‘Cornell Pink’ is smothered with flowers. You can find it planted in a pleasant band that runs through the Azalea Garden and lights the hillside up with girly pink flowers.
