The Curious Case of the Color Changing Chrysanthemums

Fact:  In September I bought some white mums for my whiskey barrel planters.  

I present this picture for evidence:

Exhibit A

Fact:  Two weeks later, the WHITE mums in my two planters had somehow turned into...

Exhibit B

PINK mums!

Closeup of Exhibit B

Fact: After several more days, the flowers turned an even darker pink.

Exhibit C

Is it some sort of crazy color-changing cultivar?

Or a condition of the cooling fall climate?

Closeup of Exhibit C

Any gumshoe gardeners out there that can crack this confounding case?

I'm almost sure this isn't the scheme of my shifty, scalawag squirrels...

Dewberries

To the delight of my kids, Dewberry season is upon us!  In our backyard, Dewberries grow rampant in the open, sunny parts surrounding our detention pond.  Closely related to blackberries, these small berries are a little on the sour side, but still a delectable find to small children who like to roam the wild places and forage for food.

Swamp Dewberries

There are several different types of Dewberries, but in our yard we have Swamp Dewberries, Rubus hispidus.  Also called Bristly Dewberries or Swamp Blackberries, they are native to the Eastern half of the U.S. and Canada.  This Dewberry plant is a low-growing, trailing vine that is covered in prickly hairs and spreads to form a low groundcover.

As indicated by the name, the Swamp Dewberry likes swampy places.  They are frequently found on the edge of wetlands (such as my detention pond).  In early summer, the plants are covered in white flowers, small but pretty.

As with so many native berrying plants, Dewberries are beloved by wildlife.  Native bees use the leaves for nesting material, and the flowers attract many different kinds of bees, small butterflies, and other assorted creatures in search of pollen and nectar.

Honeybee on Dewberry flower

The berries that result from the pollinated flowers are an important source of food for a large variety of songbirds and gamebirds.  Small animals such as chipmunks, mice, and raccoons also eat Dewberries.  The leaves of the Dewberry plant are also eaten by rabbits and deer.

a tiny bee on the Dewberry flower

I honestly would not grow Dewberries in a garden setting, as it spreads quite rapidly and would become weedy and take over.  If one needed a groundcover for a large wild area, however, this would do the trick.  Dewberries are one of those pioneer plants that are first to reestablish after a fire or after an area has been cleared.  They prevent erosion of soil and establish conditions for other, larger plants to move in.

I am glad to have a lot of Dewberries in the backyard, however.  I like having plants for the enjoyment of wildlife, as well as for the enjoyment of two (sometimes wild) children!

Happy Wildflower Wednesday!  

To see native wildflowers growing in other bloggers' yards, visit Clay and Limestone's site.

An August Turn About the Front Gardens

It's been a nice, cool summer this year, and while that hasn't been so great for all my spicy pepper plants, the flowers are loving it.

In the front of the house, the Purple Coneflowers and Nicotiana are still going strong, and the Cosmos are starting to bloom.  The rockstar of the front garden right now, though, is my Hibiscus 'Cranberry Crush'.  Is it possible to outshine this?

'Cranberry Crush' Hibiscus

This Hibiscus is a hybrid cultivar.  Its parentage includes various hybrids of the native species H. moscheutos, H. coccineus, and H. laevis.  I absolutely love the billowy, cupped shape of the flowers, and the foliage is even quite pretty, with a reddish tint to the leaves.

On the other side of the driveway, though, my blue garden is trying it's best not to be outshone.  The blue Balloon Flower has been blooming nearly all summer long, and next to it is blooming some amazingly blue Salvia.  (The seed packet was labeled 'Sky Blue' Salvia, but I'm guessing it is the same as Salvia farinacea 'Victoria'.)  They look absolutely beautiful next to the 'Worcester Gold' Caryopteris with its contrasting golden leaves!

Sadly, the blue Salvia are so little that they really need a mass of plants to make more of an impact.  Very few of the seeds in the packet even germinated so I didn't get too many plants, but what can you say?  It was one of those impulse seed packet buys from a grocery store.  (You know we've all done it!) Thus the moral of the story is to stick with seeds from reputable dealers only...

Thankfully, my Balloon Flower has quite a presence!

In addition to working on the bed around my new red greenhouse, I've also been determined to do something this summer with the strip between the road and the sidewalk (known in the gardening world as 'the hellstrip') next to my mailbox.  I've planted some grasses, more Purple Coneflowers, Coreopsis, Nicotiana, and Yarrow there.  I can't wait until my plants get large enough to choke out all the weeds that have been constantly springing up!  (The weeds love this weather, too!)

I've also transplanted a few rocks that I found growing in my yard.  So far out of everything they seem to grow the best here, no matter the weather.  The rocks do quite fine with transplanting - the gardener, not so much.  It seems anytime I move rocks around my yard, it irritates the tendonitis in my wrists, so I am back to being good for a few weeks.

I hope all of your gardens are enjoying the summer weather as much as mine is!  For more of what's blooming in gardens around the world, check out Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day over at May Dreams Gardens blog.

Happy Gardening!

Wordless Wednesday - The Life of a Purple Coneflower

Swamp Verbena

Out behind our house we have a detention pond.  Being a detention pond, as opposed to a retention pond, sometimes there's several inches of standing water in it, while other times it's dry.  Lots of people probably think of this as unusable space, but I see it as potential for something I'd love to have in my garden - a meadow!

It doesn't know it yet, but this detention pond is going to be a meadow.

Right now it's not really quite my ideal meadow (or as Mr. Red House calls it, my 'mud-dow', since it's usually muddy there.)  It's mostly full of cattails, ferns, and grasses;  however the large majority of flowering plants in the pond are comprised of the terribly invasive Purple Loosestrife.

the beautiful, but highly invasive Purple Loosestrife

On the upside there are some Goldenrods and Asters in my meadow/muddow, and I've even spotted some Joe-Pye Weed and Common Milkweed growing wild on the banks.  Then last week I saw this:

Swamp Verbena, or Verbena hastata, is a nice, native perennial that likes, well, swampy areas (if you couldn't tell from the name.)  It likes full or partial sun and grows between 2 to 5 feet tall.  The sunnier the site, the taller it gets. It is supposed to be a great substitute for invasive species like Purple Loosestrife since it likes similar conditions. (Hurry up, little Verbena!  So far the Loosestrife is winning!)

Swamp Verbena flowers

Swamp Verbena is also known as Blue Verbena, Blue Vervain, and Simpler's Joy.  Why the nickname 'Simpler's Joy', you wonder?  (I also wondered!)  Apparently back in the day this plant was very easy for Simplers - aka Herbalists - to sell, since people used it as a folk remedy for quite a number of ailments.  (There is a similar Verbena native to Europe with the same nickname that was thought to cure all sorts of stuff, as well as have supernatural properties.)

When the little flowers get old, they fall, making little purple piles on the leaves.

This native plant is great for wildlife.  The flowers attract a number of bees, including Bumblebees and the specialized Verbena bee (Calliopsis subgenus Verbenapis), and birds eat its seeds.  It is also a host for the Verbena Moth and the Common Buckeye butterfly.

I think by itself Swamp Verbena is kind of a funny-looking plant with all its little candlesticks of flowers, but I'll bet it would look great in a mass at the back of a border...

...or en masse in a meadow!

See other native wildflowers over at the site Clay and Limestone for Wildflower Wednesday.

A Little Butterfly? A Tiny Plane? No, it's a Polygala paucifolia!

It's our first spring here in this house, and I have been excited to see what comes up in the woodlands in our yard.  So far some beautiful native plants and wildflowers have started making an appearance - Cinnamon Fern, Starflower, False Lily-of-the-valley, and wild Violets.  Then I stumbled (quite literally, oops!) into a patch of these while walking through our woods:

Polygala paucifolia

I have a little colony of Gaywings growing in my woods!  Polygala paucifolia, also known as Gaywings, Fringed Polygala, or Flowering Wintergreen, are short, little plants, easy to miss unless you look down.. (or trip and fall into them..)

Gaywings, spring-blooming wildflower

Gaywings are native to Eastern North America, growing from Canada down to the Georgia mountains.  They spread on creeping, partly underground stems, and are generally found in moist, acidic, wooded sites.  They bloom in May or June, and the winged flowers are often compared to butterflies or even little pink propeller airplanes.

Looks like a field of little tiny airplanes?
Or a bunch of little pink butterflies, alighting on some leaves?

The 'wings' of the flower are actually made up of sepals.  Each flower does have three petals, two of which form a tube around the reproductive structures.  The third petal is fringed, looking like a propeller for the airplane-shaped flower.  When a bee or other pollinator lands on this third petal, the weight opens up the tube, allowing access to the pollen (or cockpit, if we're still going with the airplane motif?).

ready for takeoff...

The resulting seeds are actually planted by ants.  The seeds have little attachments on them called elaiosomes, that are very rich in nutrients.  Ants like to feed these elaiosomes to their young, and in doing so they end up carrying the seeds off and 'planting' them in their ant nests.

And just in case the insects fail to pollinate the flowers and make any seeds, each plant also has a couple of tiny, inconspicuous flowers that are underground and self-fertilized.

Polygala paucifolia is in the Milkwort family, and people once believed that if they fed the leaves of this plant to nursing mothers or dairy cattle, they would produce more milk (in Latin, 'poly' means 'many or much' and 'gala' means 'milk').

yum, yum..

According to online reports, Gaywings are a little hard to get established, but when they are happy, they will make a nice colony.  I think they would make a beautiful clump of ground cover for a woodland garden, as the leaves stay mostly evergreen.

Polygala paucifolia is honestly quite hard to find if you are hoping to get some for your garden.  I can't find many reports of people propagating these from seeds, or really, too many reports of propagating these at all.  The main suggestions seem to be propagation from stem cuttings or by carefully dividing the rootstock.  I only found one online source for them: Enchanter's Garden Native Plant Nursery in Hinton, WV (maybe someone else knows of other sources?)  You could also try a local wildflower nursery.

For now, I am enjoying them where they are in the woods!

p.s. For a look at other wildflowers that are blooming this May, visit this month's Wildflower Wednesday at Clay and Limestone's blog!

Calling All North American Gardeners - Help!

If you want to keep seeing this:

Monarch butterfly

you are going to need this:

Monarch laying eggs

Help our Monarchs make babies...

a baby Monarch

plant Milkweed!

one type of milkweed - Asclepias tuberosa

As the population of Monarchs dwindles severely, the great migration of the Monarchs is in serious danger of becoming extinct. 

area of land occupied by Monarchs at their overwintering sites in Mexico
source - Monarch Joint Venture 

The Monarchs have taken a battering on all sides.  Harsh weather and habitat loss have led to record low numbers of these beautiful butterflies in North America. 

While we have no control over the weather, we can plant Milkweed in order to help the monarchs as much as possible! 

Milkweed is especially critical in the Great Plains regions.  With the rise of corn prices (due in part to the government mandate of adding ethanol to gasoline), millions of acres of grasslands have now been converted to Corn and Soybean farms.  

Furthermore, these large farms are switching to the new varieties that are genetically engineered to tolerate herbicides (such as Roundup Ready Corn).  The spraying of herbicides has eliminated the milkweed that used to sprout up in and around the crops - and thus eliminated much of the breeding ground for Monarchs.

Monarch laying eggs on Milkweed

So calling all North American gardeners - especially you all in the Great Plains region!

Let's do what we can to save the migration...

and hopefully not witness the end of an era.

Milkweed comes in a variety of colors, and there are Milkweeds for just about every type of garden, from dry to swampy.
Here are just a few online sources for Milkweed seeds and plants:

Annie's Annuals & Perennials
Prairie Moon Nursery

Prairie Nursery

Shooting Star Nursery
Rose Franklin's Perennials & Herbs
Lazy S'S Farm & Nursery