Hmm... can be sure just how many Texas natives are growing here. Weeds obscuring a lot, but the TX star hibiscus rises above most. :)
MK, Jim and I discussed me sending bunch of seed to amargia. I have a pile forming so I'll let you know when it might Shi p. Hee hee. No urgency I hope. I'm behind on my trades, but it'll get there!!! :)
I took a few snaps today. Some I don't recognize...another mystery plant, here:
This must be a gift from one of my songbirds. A few have sprung up in the yard. Must be one of our native demand. Am growing Senna alata on purpose in the back. I have never gotten one to bloom. Last year I came close. Had massive bud stalks but the frost took it.
The senna in the image has already bloomed small yellow pea like flowers. This particular plant is only about8"-10" tall. Any guesses?
Last year I planted a sprig of Jerusalem Artichoke. This is what it looks like now, eating a highbush blueberry and my river oats, among other things.
That's a lot of plant from one sprig! I can't even see the blueberry, but the Jerusalem Artichoke looks great with your river oats.
Do senna leaves happen to fold on top of each other at night like a stack of pancakes? I have a plant in my front yard that I just noticed today. I had no idea what it is, but its leaves look similar to the ones in your photo. I went out with a flashlight to take a look at the leaves, but wasn't able to hold the flashlight and pry them apart too!
Yes, the senna folds its leaves like a prayer plant. Super cool!
I grew the S. alata on purpose the first time several years ago because it is host to several butterfly species.
There are half-circle cut outs on one of my plants at the back of the yard. I watched one day as a small bee looking insect cut out these holes with its mouth and flew off with it! And later returned. Must have been building a nest I guess. So the plant attracts all k idns of visitors, even without flowers. I will have to ID this one. One of the natives is S. marilandica (the plant is also known as Cassia marilandica. Can't say which came first, taxinomically).
Good luck with your ID. :)
The plant in my yard looks very similar to yours except that it has only 4 leaves per stem.
Bees built a nest in one of my bird houses this year. I got quite a surprise when I opened it to see if I needed to clean it out. I tried to screw the door back on tightly, but the ungrateful little buggers started to swarm around me. I have no problem being close to a few bees buzzing around a plant, but not a whole hive of them!.
Do you think this is your senna?
Senna mexicana var. chapmanii
http://davesgarden.com/guides/pf/go/66470/
The third photo in the plant files link looks like yours. The others look like completely different plants to me - maybe because they're more mature?
Definitely no hurry, Amanda. We are in a weeding frenzy at the moment. It has seldom been dry enough to mow the last few months and lightning and thunder interrupted things every time we started weeding.
Thanks for the links. I'm going to try drying some muscadine skins for tea this year as someone wrote about on the mustang grape file. That is a use I had never heard of. The only monarda we have is spotted bee balm (Monarda punctata). Others would be welcome. I've thought blackfoot daisies would be perfect behind a retaining wall, but I haven't been able to find any.
Melissa Kay, I will be more than happy to send you seeds for the monarda citriodora. I picked a few clumps of seed heads one year and forgot about them. They sprouted out of the container that I had off to the side of the porch this spring. Bees and butterflies love them! My Blackfoot Daisies have some buds forming, but not as many as I'd hoped. They're easy to find around here though so I can always dig a few.
We planted Senna alata against the south side of the main building with the hope it will survive the winter. But, some seeds have been kept back in case the winter is unusually cold. As odd as the weather has been, I'm hedging my garden gambling bets.
Elderberry and beautyberry are developing well now that the rain has slowed. . Planted black mulberries.
Jim and I visited the Dothan Botanical Garden in hopes of catching the Blackfoot daisies and the fire cracker vine blooming in the butterfly garden. . My timing was off on those, but there were still things to see. I'm assuming these are natives since they were all in the butterfly garden area.
The senna volunteer has seed pods from the tiny flowers. They are at least 3" long. But very thin, like a bean.
This message was edited Sep 11, 2013 11:04 PM
MK, Blackfoots will bloom as long as there is enough water and heat for them! The buds on mine should be popping open soon.
Carey, I'll check on the Blackfoot daisies again in a week or two. Around here, many of the long blooming plants take a little break after going through the worst of the heat and start blooming again as temps cool down.
We got an unexpected red, white and blue bloom color combination in garlic chive blossoms, Texas blue mist flower (Conoclinium coelestinum) and oxblood lilies ( Rhodophiala bifida)
Jim wants me to intentionally introduce the combination into his Old Soldiers Garden. I guess that would work if I containerize the blue mist flower to keep it under control. It's worth a try. There isn’t anything going on in that area this time of year. Gold and purple just naturally seem to dominate in September. Some other bloom or fruit colors would be a welcome change. It appears I've lost my white fruited beautyberry. Hoping I can find another one at the botanical garden's fall plant sale. Mk*
This year I didn't do much at all, so I'm glad it's gone wild on its own.
Not all natives, but mostly geared towards butterflies and pollinators, this is what's going on here:
First pic - TX star hibiscus has been taken over by the Ipomoea coccinea, identified as a noxious weed in forty-six (?!) states?
Second, the first blooms from a nippon daisy i grew from a tiny sprig last year.
Next, a purple castor bean, which I have never been able to get to bloom/produce seed, so this season is a milestone;
Next, the first Monarch of the season in the mixed red and yellow bed in the front yard; and
Finally - a massive fleabane I grew from seed sent from Kansas by a fellow DG'er a couple of years ago.
This message was edited Sep 26, 2013 8:46 PM
A little more. :)
First is a general idea of what most of the beds looks like. Gardening Gone Wild.
Second is a knotweed, who knows which one, but LOve them all. These are about 5' tall or so and hang very prettily all over these beds. The sedum behind has flowered and now turning dark.
Next, a lantana volunteer from last year's containerized 'Ms. Huff '. I don't know if she'll come true, but it's a small plant about to put forth her first flowers.
Then, in Max's Memory Garden, fleabane and crazy fall blooming white asters on top of one of my favorite purple fall mums about to POP open is just crazy gorgeous, and the bees love the tiny white flowers of these asters.
And last - a pile of natives - the chocolate eupatorium with the solidago 'Fireworks behind and the Symphotrichium laeve whose blooms just started to POP this morning/afternoon.
What fun! :)
What a wild and wonderful garden! The castor bean is very exotic looking.
I was glad to see your fleabane, because I just collected seeds from plants in Utah that looked very similar and I didn't know what they were. There were purple and blue-flowered ones about 2 feet tall, and white-flowered ones about 8 inches high. They're considered weeds, but I thought they would look great in my wildflower meadow-to-be in the woods near me (not enough sun in my own yard), so I grabbed seeds from plants a lawn care guy was yanking out of the ground in order to put down mulch. The butterflies, bees and I will enjoy seeing them next year.
Love pulling weeds! I wonder what you will get when you try those from seed?
There are SO many plants in the aster family you might have to be an expert to distinguish between these white bloomers. In fact, what my friend sent from Kansas as a fleabane looks more like something else. Still, hers is a giant hardy thing. I bet the asters from Utah are very sturdy. One variety of hers from Kansas that's an early bloomer seems to melt in my NC summer Sun.
Thanks for looking. Have you got some pretty fall flowers up there?
A wild poinsettia I transplanted to my flower bed last year.
Crystal - is the summer poinsettia hardy there? A friend sent some cuttings up from Florida. I have rooted them. I suppose I need to read up on what to do with them - they are so pretty!
Apparently so. It came back in the same place I set it out yesterday. I was surprised as I thought it was probably annual
Apparently so. It came back in the same place I set it out yesterday. I was surprised as I thought it was probably annual
O summer poinsettia is Amaranthus, totally different from this. I think Summer poinsettia is an annual and probably makes a boat load of seed.
It looks like what I have ...Will check the foliage.
Amanda, I will get some photos of the "weeds" that might be fleabane.
Here are some pics of wildflowers now blooming in the woods: a small-flowered white aster, some kind of goldenrod (I hope), and what looks like a Jack-in-the-pulpit with berries - the first two are common around here but the latter, though native, isn't common in my immediate area. I was so excited to see it !
I have a mix of natives, hybrids and non-natives blooming in my yard: Aster novae-angliae, Eupatorium coelestinum, Scutellaria incana and Lobelia siphilitica (both winding down), Chelone lyonii "Hot Lips", perennial Begonia, Sedum, Salvia guaranitica "Black and Blue", a fall-blooming daisy (maybe Montauk daisy) and perennial geranium "Rozanne". I also have a supposedly annual purplish-blue lobelia that is in full-bloom (I'm hoping it will re-seed), neon orange Cosmos, Cuphea, Heliotrope and a few nasturtium blossoms.
Nice! There are soo many fall blooming white asters it blows my mind.
I had been hoping to get some Eurybia divaricatus for shade, but the power company came thru last summer clearing 18 years of growth of the pecan tree in our yard. And now I don't have so much shade after all.
Does this plant look like yours?
http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/PlantFinder/PlantFinderDetails.aspx?kempercode=h170
I also love the goldenrods. A least they seem easier to distinguish from one another. :)
The Arisaema is a great find. The woodland species seem so mysterious. If they didn't have those gorgeous berries I might not recognize them out there.
Sounds like you have a nice variety of plants in th garden blooming. What kind of perennial begonia do you have? I have some strawberry begonia that I should pay more attention to. I have a geranium 'samboor' and have enjoyed pairing other plants with contrasting foliage. That's new for me, th foliage thing. Cville_gardener is really great with that. I'm really liking purple foliage, something to stand out in the sea of green. Not so many natives for that, except some of the grasses.
Thanks for sharing. This season sure has flown by.
I think it is Aster racemosus. I really love the dainty little flowers. It is the most common white-flowering aster in my area, and it grows very well in sunny areas too.
I wouldn't have noticed the Jack-in-the-pulpit if it didn't have those bright red berries! I should mark its spot in the woods so I can try to catch it flowering next year.
I'm not sure what kind of begonia I have; a colleague gave me a starter plant years ago. Here's a photo I took in August, just when the begonia and Chelone lyonii were starting to bloom.
Oh wow that's a pretty little shaded spot. Love the savanah girl ... Have debated having her here.
It never occurred to me to try any of my cane begonias in the ground. Does it die back in winter? Flower? So, TH strawberry begonia is a ground cover. Not very flash but does push up some very pretty very dainty little pale pink/almost white flowers in spring.
I will have to revisit my guides to the white asters. It is different from our most common species. I tend to see it more on the outskirts and not in our wild green spaces in town. That's one I would have to import to the garden maybe for a little MORE variety.
Haha. I'm being silly. I get silly when I'm tired. Probably from having a cat sleeping on many head.
My giant smooth aster has single flowers popping open all over it. Fun to watch the new blooms as soon enough it will be covered so densely I get lost looking at it. :)
Looks like Begonia grandis in photo. If so, they spread by seed. Just do nothing and they come up all around. Mine was in a pot several years and began to reseed in surrounding pots. I had tried for years to find some but they were not that easy to locate.This year I had one that was about 18 inches tall. I had seen them that tall, but never had one so big.
I sent off a small package of milkweed pods for you Amanda, I have lots more available if you need it. I could probably find a shoebox full if you really needed it!
The City Authority here has given me free reign to plant a local park area here. It's about 150 acres with woodland and a nice asphalt walking trail around a fairly large pond. It's pretty barren right now, but they are thinking about doing a wildflower scatter patch along a sizeable section of the walkway.
I have a huge quantity of Tithonia, B-E Susans, Purple Coneflowers, Sunflowers, Cosmos, Zinnias and Marigolds left over from previous projects that would likely fit in well. Actually, I'm sort of trying to get rid of some of this stuff anyway.
Here's a question for y'all: Can some of these seeds be planted in the Fall and over Winter?
Or must I wait until Spring to plant them all at once? It would seem to me that some of them would be natural re-seeders anyway, but I have no way of knowing which is which. Can they be just "tossed in place" or do they have to be "planted" (like in a garden)? This is a wild wooded area I'm working with. I really don't want to get into serious tilling with this project.
One thought I had was to simply use a long handled dibble shaped like a broomstick with a pointed end to insert the seeds, making it much faster and easier. Any other ideas?
Thanks all!
Al
Thanks Crystal - I'll look into that one. I have a friend who collects begonias. Maybe she has some already...
Hi Al!
I did just receive your packet - very generous! Thank you. I'm thinking due to the "difficulty" perceived with trying to start some of these things from seed I may grow the plants and have to ship plants instead of seed next year!
About planting at the park in New York - What fun!!! But a LOT of work. Bless you. What is there now?
I've been studying meadows/restoring prairie for a while now. It's not just as easy as tossing down some seed. Prairie/meadow plantings are mowed just once or twice a year once established and to keep down competing weeds and prevent tree/shrubs from popping up and shading out your plants.
Natural meadows/prairie would have either been burned (either from natural causes like lightening or intentional, fire as native Americans did to clear brush for hunting) or trampled by megafauna (buffalo/elk, etc) so the cutting simulates to some degree the loss/destruction to prevent trees/shrubs from shading the prairie plants.
Here are some links to explain how to plant large areas/meadows that may give you some ideas. Sometimes glyphosate can be used in spring to keep down weed growth and allow wildflower mixes to sprout and gain advantage.
Let me know if I can help! I've collected lists of commercial retail and wholesale vendors who ship seed and plants both.
When to plant:
http://www.americanmeadows.com/general-guides/late-fall-and-winter-planting-times
How to plant a meadow:
http://www.newenglandwild.org/article-depository/specific-invasive-plants/the-weedy-the-wily-the-wicked.html/?searchterm=how%20to%20plant%20meadow
http://www.wildflower.org/howto/show.php?id=5
http://www.pressherald.com/life/homeandgarden/patience-pays-off-for-wildflower-meadow_2013-09-29.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/garden/11meadow.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
I saw a Begonia grandis "Alba" in the garden center today, and it looked just like mine so I believe that is what it is. While neither native nor attractive to pollinators, it thrives with neglect, and I need a few plants like that ! I planted numerous Columbines next to it and they seem to have died (possibly dormant, but I doubt it), leaving that bare spot.
The begonia foliage lasts until frost and is a little late in emerging in the spring, as I recall. I used to throw away the seeds, but let them fall last year and ended up with a bunch of cute little offspring to spread around.
Here's a current photo with the Chelone lyonii blooming in the background. The fern is a perennial, semi-evergreen fern - an Autumn fern, maybe. Also incredibly easy.
Amanda, thanks for the links. The articles were a good reminder of the patience required with perennials, especially when growing by seed.
Al - that sounds like a fun, but daunting, project. I hope you have lots of helpers! I'm doing a native plant restoration project on a much smaller scale, and it's a lot of work!
I don't know about the other plants, but in my experience BE Susans and Cosmos do not grow well from seeds dropped on the ground in the fall/winter. If they did, I'd have thousands of them every spring. I think the precipitation causes the seeds to rot.
Are there deer in the park (probably a rhetorical question)? The plants you mentioned aren't deer candy, but you'll want to keep the tastes of your local deer population in mind when selecting other plants.
Good luck! Sounds exciting.
Thanks Amanda for all the information, it's a great start. I've got some time to think all this out, but will likely do most of the actual planting in the Spring months. A good, simple, logical plan would in order. When I get back to my other computer I'll send some photos for you all to look at. The park is really quite nice, just a little barren and not too colorful.
Again, thanks all for your help.
Al
It's very exciting! Who among us wouldn't give their left arm to have ~150 acres to plant. :)
Well, I don't think I'm expected to plant ALL 150 acres. Perhaps just brighten up a few spots. They already have a maintenance crew to look after the park.
Lovely place, it's a large pond circled by a walking trail. There is some local history here, the pond location was once a watering hole for steam locomotives on the Erie Railroad. The tracks are parallel to the trail. Kids (of all ages) can still wave to the Engineers on board the trains, which are now diesel. Park crews have added pavilions, picnic tables, play areas, benches, lighting, and a nice asphalt walkway.
Al
Have you considered planting some nice flowering shrubs in the back of the flower beds? In addition to looking nice, they might help keep people from walking through the beds - which people might do if that's the shortest way from points A to B. Perhaps your local garden centers might donate some. Our garden centers drastically discount everything in the fall because they know they might not survive the winter.
Here's something odd. Not a native. A volunteer from last year's Zinnia's, but unlike any Zinnia I've ever seen!
I thought maybe it would just be the first bud earlier in the summer, but the entire plant grew this way, no petals on the flowers. VERY strange.
Any thoughts on this phenomenon?
Deformed?
The golden rods are in their glory here today. Roadsides lined with asters of all kinds-white, lavender, purple, some ageratum and Eupatorium thrown in. Just Glorious!
Amanda, I found this thread that referred to such Zinnias as "feminas". It looks as if yours are feminas. http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/1219961/
Interesting info. I had no idea...
