What’s blooming mid summer in southeastern Ontario – in appreciation of plants that don’t mind a bit of drought.
Tag: native plants
Ephemeral in The County
On Saturday I noticed a few of these dainty yellow flowers opening by the driveway. Come Sunday afternoon the leaf littered floor of the entire tree line was covered with Trout Lily. Just like that. Other native spring ephemerals just in bloom include a flower I used to call woodland Geranium. I kinda knew it […]
If a polygonatum falls in the forest…
Solomon Seal is probably my favourite shade tolerant perennial. It has graceful arching stems with beautiful, dainty hanging flowers in spring that bees love; the leaves stay dark green all summer; it’s extremely drought tolerant and, in the autumn, everything turns first deep yellow then a beautiful orange/tan before leaves and sometimes whole stems collapse […]
Perennials Do It Too!
This is the time of year everyone on the eastern part of North America – and anywhere else there’s woods and forests with deciduous trees – goes gaga over fall foliage. Folks take road trips to the country or the hills wherever they may be to take it all in, and Instagram, blogs and Facebook […]
How to Stand Out in a Crowd
I have large patches of purple and white Liatris scattered around the garden – all originating from the seed of a few plants I purchased and planted 15 years ago. The height of the flower spikes vary year to year, depending on how much rain we get. This spring, with record breaking rainfalls in April […]
A Glow that Attracts…
This is one of the reasons I love the bright yellow glow of Goldenrod (Solidago sp.) and one of the reason I cut it back in early summer — to encourage late season flowers to help feed a multitude of pollinators. How many can you spot? Glow
going to seed…
This time last year we had already had our first frost – not unusual around here – but this year, summer started late and it’s just now starting to cool down. Today’s high is 11 but the next two weeks, if you believe the forecast, will be in the high teens and low twenties. With […]
In Praise of a Not Very Spectacular Native Shrub
Snowberry. Doesn’t the name conjures up images of large, juicy, creamy berries produced after pollinators have spent the summer happily buzzing amongst fluttery, multi-petaled white flowers? Then you add the botanical name, Symphoricarpos albus, and reality sets in. Latin can really be a buzzkill sometimes. For me, the Snowberry is a memory pant — a […]
7 Early Fall Favourites
In this first week of autumn I realize there’s nothing new left to come up in the garden – no new flower buds to open, no new unfurling of leaves, no more sudden growth spurts of stalk and stem. The final Hollyhock flowers – those at the very tip of six or seven foot spikes […]
Six ‘Weeds’ My Garden Can’t Be Without
As Irish novelist Margaret Wolfe Hungerford wrote in 1878 (in her book Molly Bawn), “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” When we bought our parcel of land it was a field surrounded by trees. The field had tall grass and, according to some, a lot of weeds. Now, 15 years later, I’ve […]
