How pure is your garden?

What is a wild flower (wildflower) garden?

Some will say it's a garden planted with only native plants. Hard core environmentalists would say it's only locally growing native plants. Others say it's a garden with species plants from many different countries.

I suppose I don't have a wild flower garden that fits into any of those criteria, instead we have the worst kind of naturalistic style. In our case this results in a lot of tall grasses, Docks (Rumex) and Brambles (Rubus), not intentionally planted and we are always on the losing side of the battle.

We set out to have a native plant garden only, then the dreaming stopped as natives that love heavy clay, desperately poor drainage and a north facing aspect are few and far between. We tried to find species plants from other countries that liked this situation (still dreaming). We even resorted to growing some cultivars and oddities of native species as well as species plants from other countries (horror to the purists!).

Now I'm off to hang my head in shame for even daring to call the front garden a wild flower area. In the meantime, how pure is your (wild flower) garden?

Weeeeeellllll, I'm aiming for a fairly authentic native flower garden - the plants I'm putting in there are all considered native to this area. I may find that some of them don't do so well, and I replace them with some plants that are not native, but I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

Terry have you ever been to Cheekwood in Nashville. They have a wonderful native plant garden. As I remember it has a small garden shed or cottage and was called Carolyn's garden. I was very impressed with it when I was there 7 or 8 years ago. I grew up in Nashville and went to Isaac Litton HS. I'm also into planting natives. I'm so glad more people are getting into this. It's very helpful to the wildlife which is my passion. There is so much to learn. As time goes by I find out that some of our beloved natives are really not. They have adapted here and the wildlife adapt to them as well. Well, except for kudzu. Baa I found it difficult to introduce wildflowers into my yard because the habitat was not exactly what they needed. So have been disappointed when they don't survive. Some of the wildflowers are so fragile and really picky about where they will grow. No need to hang your head.

I must confess I haven't been to Cheekwood - I know I should, and in fact, I have a note on my calendar that they're having a wildflower something-or-other early next month.

I did get to hear (and meet) Margie Hunter, who lives in Nashville, and has written a book on gardening with plants native to middle Tennessee. A lot of what she has in her garden is what I've got planned for mine.

We have an area (~50' x 150') at the very back of our property that stays fairly moist, and has open shade (tall cedars, a few wild plums and VERY tall hackberries.) I've got two years' worth of leaves in their final stages of decomposition in the areas I've designated for beds.

Our hope is to create an area that is attractive to wildlife as well as conducive to native plants.

Trillium

Thanks, it's a bit of Brit self depreciating humour rather than a realistic view *G*. We planted the front garden 17ft x 14ft with nativeish plants originally because both front and back garden had been left to their own devices for a couple of decades and had supported a number of species of local wildlife.

The garden situation is very difficult and we've tried to locate plants that will grow in those conditions. Here we have tough licencing laws on the sale of seeds and plants, each species has to be on a specific EU register to enable nuseries to sell them. There are some wildflower merchants, not many, the choice is limited and the plants not always British in source. We don't take plants from the wild, seeds are only taken if there is an abundance of that plant and then maybe 10 seeds at most. We take the view that if we are going to grow a native wild plant then it must be British to make some contribution to stopping the foreign type species crossing with the local wild populations.

All things considered our wild flower patch is never going to meet the purists criteria for a wild flower garden. :)

*sigh* all my favorite "wildflowers" growing up turn out to be European interlopers! Daisies and Queen Anne's Lace and even dandelions! I do have a good crop of various native goldenrod (solidago, Baa) and native asters, but friends and family insist on weedwhacking them or running over them with lawnmowers and haybines! (I promise I'll stop with the exclamation points soon, I'm just excited to be back!).

My wildflower woodland garden does have native trilliums, spring beauties, (I'm brain dead today, common names from here on out), Jacob's ladder, violets of varying hues, stork's bill geraniums, jack-in-pulpit, Solomons seal, false Solomon's seal, blue cohosh, and (possibly) dutchman's britches (or is it squirrel corn?). These are all from my woods and started from tiny bits of huge clumps that I brought up to the yard. That is to say, I took tiny bits from huge clumps and left the huge clumps in the wild.

I once thought that purity of verifiable natives was a desparately wonderful thing. But as I grow older (and older and older), I find that diversity is perhaps more to be desired, if it doesn't include extinction of any native species. Modern hybridisation has made so many of the species scarce that I think all more reason to plant with a wide brush, so to speak.

Ok, this is getting silly. I'll try to clear this all up sometime when I'm not on heavy medication. Promise! (had to get one more in for good measure).

Kathleen I was near Panama Rocks a couple of years ago walking in the woods and found painted trilliums. I had never seen them before. They are so delicate but the pink in the throats made up for their smaller blossom. I have three kinds of trilliums in my yard. The big white ones, the maroon called Stinking Benjamin and a yellow one that I moved and don't know if it will survive. I had trouble last year with rabbit or deer eating them. They had been undistured for 10 years. I grow just about all the same wildflowers you do, except there is a small stream at the back property line that I have planted Marsh Marigolds, Yellow Flags, wild ginger, columbines and skunk cabbage. It is really getting too shady for some of them.

TG, you were a mere 4 miles from me and my woods! We're west of Panama Rocks on 474, about 3 miles past the parking lot for the county walking trail. Isn't it beautiful here???

We also have a creek, with lots of stuff. I haven't been able to get marsh marigolds - cowslips around here - to grow. I don't know why.

Our local wildflowers are widely acclaimed, and Lady Bird Johnson did a great job of making the public aware of them. But in my own pasture-garden areas, this presents a dilemma.

The purpose of most wild flora is probably best realized in its role as food for wild animals. Many of the more attractive plants are browsed by deer and other animals. The natural state of flora here, in its purest form, was quite different from the present state. Many native plants have been over grazed by livestock and wildlife, to the point of extinction or nearly so. Consequently, "foreign" plants have become established and have choked out natives. The blueberry juniper so prevalent in central Texas isn't what the Indians saw when they rode across the meadows. Rather, that tree has moved in and crowded out the native grasses and some types of oaks. The smaller flowering plants have been forced to adapt or die out as the sunny meadows became shady juniper habitats.

My gardens include viburnum, lantana, various sages and other deer-resistant types, by choice. They also include things I know the beasts and varmints will devour, but plant anyway. I try to plant enough that I can spare them a meal or so. Some things have been utterly unsuccessful because of such heavy feeding, others are barely hanging on. So I think of it as a wildflower garden, but not a native one. The natives lost that battle long ago. As humankind encroaches on their territory, wildlife is forced to dine on what we bring because we have upset the balance that formerly provided their food.

Taking a small iguana from the jaws of my well-fed cat and releasing it, I wondered if I was interfering with the natural food chain.

Kathleen

Thanks for bringing up the 'native wild flowers' being old established garden escapees.

GB, being a small island that was much invaded in times gone by, actually has quite a poor true native flora. I think I said elsewhere that we have the Romans to thank for quite a number of our vegetables and herbs. Our ancestors diet prior to other nations settling here was mainly meat and cereals (we have a wonderful arable climate), not the best of diets in modern terms. This small fact makes a mockery of the 'true' British native wild flower garden.

Aimee

England has been cultivated ever since people began to live here. By the time the Saxons et al decided England was the place to be, just 20% or so of the woodland that once covered the majority of England remained. The landscape, flora and fauna have been shaped by our ancestors and their pastoral practices.

Our flora and fauna have adapted to this quite intensive grazing and a removal of the more traditional practices for 'environmental reasons' resulted in a more rapidly decreasing flora under scrubland. The traditional grazing rights have been given back with some restrictions and some of the flora is now returning.

Since the domestic cat isn't a native mammal in the USA I'm sure you didn't disrupt the natural food chain *G*. There was a bird on some island in the New Zealand area that quickly became extinct due to European ships cats devouring the trusting little things.

Whew! Maggie will surely eat many of my iguanas and geckoes during the warm months, as she loves to hunt. She also dines on feathered friends often, as do my other two cats, Mollie and GirlCat. It really bothers me to find a tiny pile of feathers, but maybe it's a self-balancing fact of life. It's a jungle out there.

I can't say that my gardens are 100% native, but whatever goes in has to be non-invasive. By that, I mean it cannot be listed by the US Dept. of Agriculture as an exotic invasive plant--especially a Category I invasive, which is the worst kind (Melaleuca, Brazilian Pepper, and Camphor tree are examples of Cat. I). I removed one Cat. I--a camphor tree, which although it did provide berries for the birds and nesting areas, had to go. I recently heard that the Chinese elms are being considered for Cat. I listing, which means two more of my shade trees may have to go. They do spray seeds everywhere which have a bad tendency to all sprout--and survive mowing! I would say that 80-90% of my flowers, shrubs, and trees are native. The grass, azaleas, Chinese elms, Crepe Myrtles, some of the cannas, and split leaf philodendrons are not native. Been working hard to replace non-native landscape with natives and it's paying off in greater amounts of wildlife. You may have seen my posts about the juv. hawk, the snakes, woodpecker (actually a red-bellied sapsucker), a possum, etc. Using a wide variety of native plants is the way to go if you want more birds and other critters around your yard. Good thing to remember: pick the right plant for the right place (i.e. don't put a water loving plant in dry sand and expect it to live). Natives have their limitations, too.

Kathleen, you probably have other natives that you hadn't realized were natives. Phlox paniculata, cardinal flower, coreopsis, lisianthus, rudbeckias, asters, even a few roses are US natives. A lot of American flowers have been taken to Europe and Japan and the hybridizers got busy making them beautiful!

I grow many native woodland wildflowers because in my horribly dense hard clay and yearly summer drought, mostly only native woodland wildflowers survive without a lot of coddling. I especially try to find those plants that are nearing extinction in the wild, and attempt to grow them for seed in my woodland.

There is a local plant-rescue group who has occasional sales to the public, as well as the University's Plant and Pest Dept. that sells native seed-grown perennials. In this way I have gotten several American ginseng, several types of trillium, squirrel-corn, and even (still struggling, but maybe surviving) golden thread. I also got bird's foot violet!!!

I have been trying very hard to convince them to get seed for some of the hardy orchids, but so far they have not been able to locate a source that has them for a reasonable price.

To me, a wild flower garden is one that hasn't been over-designed. Just "wild". Sounds like mine ;D

LOL; I guess you could call my garden an eurasioamerican one... Except for my small collection of Norwegian arctic plants, everything is mixed together.

lupine, I know about those natives, but they are just scattered in a general way among the rest of the flowers. One of the cardinal flowers (Lobelia cardinalis - my brain is almost working today) is actually from a single wild seed pod collected from a very endangered plant (Plowman spare that plant!). The Gentiana andrewsii (or Gentianella andrewsii, no one seems quite sure at this point) came to me as a bedraggled root pulled out of the path of a log skidder. I have at least 2 native roses, R. palustris and R.virginiana, which are in the rose fences. I was just listing the very small "dedicated" spot. The Eupatorium (both JoePye Weed and Boneset) are in the perennial border with the yarrow, vervain, asters, goldenrod (when it doesn't get whacked) and Spirea tomentosa ( steeple bush). I have virgin's bower (Clematis virginiana), meadowsweet (Spirea latifolia), filipendula rubra (I'm showing off now - better quit!).

So maybe for some, a "wildflower garden" is really more about having a natural, unstructured type of garden, rather than defining it by the provenance of the plants used?

Some plants are better suited to this type of garden than others, even if they're not exactly natives :)

An 'unstructured' look is called the naturalistic style rather than widlflower garden.

Perhaps the most famous garden designer of the naturalistic style is Gertrude Jekyll but it was William Robinson (who happened to be a friend of Jekyll), a Victorian landscape/garden designer who bought this naturalistic style to the Victorian garden. He was scating about the formal, bedding plant gardens of the era and did something that was really quite radical for his time, he didn't succumb to the rush for new and improved hybrid cultivars so beloved of the Victorians but prefered species plants and planting in great swathes. He was a prolific writer on the subject of gardens and their design. Gravetye Manor in West Sussex (S.E. England) still has a garden of his creation thriving today.

I guess what I was thinking of is a step or two beyond Jekyll et al, into what is ubiquitously termed a "woodland-style" or "meadow-style" garden. No border planting, but a garden that evokes a sense of being on a path at the woods' edge, or in a meadow of wildflowers. In fact, quite often the "wildflower mixes" sold here are full of non-natives (some rather impolite thugs, even)

My idea of a wild garden is to only grow those plants that aren't hybridized, or as Chiltern would call them: "True wild forms"...

Terry and Arsenic

Yes that's my idea of a wildflower garden too. It's been interesting to see other peoples views and it seems that some here have a lot of true native plants available to plant.

Yes, Terry, most definitely full of thugs.

My approach has always been to let the wildflowers in, either by not weeding them out, or by bringing them in through rescues or gathering seeds or divisions when there were plenty to spare. I would say that I've done this only on my land, but there have been a couple of hijackings in the name of rescue (the afore mentioned gentian and cardinal flower). I'm afraid I find the purist approach a hard one to follow - there are too many lovely things out there that aren't native to my rocky acidic clay soil that I'd rather not live without.

Amen, Kathleen! I must sit on my hands to keep from planting some things I love and know aren't suited to conditions here. Azalea and camelia come to mind, and some wild ferns from Louisiana. Also, the pines that grow around my native area are so missed, but several efforts to find ways to keep them alive failed and convinced me it was cruel to subject them to any more. But there are some things I can bring here with good results, and I yield to the temptation.

Aimee, we've put bells on our cats to try and keep them from killing birds and it has helped.