Transcript: Grow Wild Gardening with Native Plants

HadleyGrow Wild Gardening with Native Plants Presented by Ed HainesDate July 16th, 2015

Dawn TurcoWelcome to today’s seminar at Hadley. I’m Dawn Turco, and I am moderating our seminar today. We have a title of Grow Wild Gardening with Native Plants. We are joined today by Hadley Gardening Instructor and Vision Rehabilitation Therapist Ed Haines. Ed is going to share his suggestions for moving beyond the types of things we find in our average gardening center and talk about other choices among the wonderful world of native plants. I have moderated several seminars at Hadley with Ed, and in fact, I have to admit I look forward to doing so. Especially when we are talking gardening which truth be told I know so little about. So let’s sit back and Grow Wild with Ed. Ed I’m handing you the microphone.

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Ed Haines:Well good afternoon everyone, and I hope you’re enjoying your spring. It’s particularly nice for me here in the north where I live. The final snowbank just melted yesterday, so that’s a huge landmark for us and a milestone rather. So we’re quite happy that things are finally growing and becoming green again, and I know all of you are as well. I see a number of my former gardening students among the list of participants, so welcome.

Thanks for joining me this afternoon for what I hope is an interesting discussion about gardening with native plants. This is a subject that I’ve become increasingly interested in over the past couple years. I thought I’d like to share a little bit of what I found out about gardening with native plant with the rest of you.

The first thing we need to understand when we talk about this subject is the definition of a native plant. What is a native plant? Native plants can be many kinds of plants. They can be grasses. They can be ferns, flowers, cacti, etcetera, but what makes them native? Well, a native plant, and I’ll give you

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a definition I got off the internet, and I think it’s a pretty good one. It’s from Cornell University. “A native plant can be said to be a plant that grows naturally in a specific area over a period of geologic time.” In other words, a native plant is a plant that has evolved over many thousands of years in a specific region.

What I love about this concept and this definition, and what excites me about it is that it means native plants have evolved with other organisms as members of a community. So, for the purposes of this afternoon’s discussion, unfortunately, because we have time constraints, I’m going to talk about plants that have evolved naturally in the North American continent. But the idea of native plants and gardening with native plants can really apply to any geographic area in the world. There are plants native to every continent, every ecosystem, so it doesn’t matter where in the world you live.

But because of time constraints let’s talk a bit about plants that have grown in North American and grown in North American before European

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settlement. We use European settlement as a defining timeline, because Europeans brought with them countless varieties of plants and animals that have in many cases they’ve certainly dominated and overrun our native species.

There are native plant purists, and I’m not one of them who feel that a true native plant is a plant that is only from within a 100 mile radius of where they happen to live. So if you’re a purist, and you’re gardening with native plants, you will only grow native plants that have evolved over thousands of years within a hundred miles of where you live within your specific geographic area and not necessarily within the North American continent itself.

I’d like to talk in a more liberal way about gardening with natives, and not really restrict the conversation to that kind of limitation. Although there’s nothing wrong with that.

Probably, I’m sure all of you know that the North American landscape prior to the arrival of European settlers was made up of a wide variety of

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ecosystems, and they included prairies, woodlands, wetlands, deserts, high deserts, swamps, etcetera. These were all communities that worked together as plants and animals and insects and reptiles, and sadly, most of these communities in North America have disappeared. And that’s primarily, of course, due to urban development and agriculture, etcetera. There really are very few original pre European settlement ecosystems left in North America.

What I like about gardening with native plants is that it’s a way for us individually to bring back just a little bit of that original landscape. I’ll give you an example. For instance, Hadley’s located in Illinois, and you may or may not know that before European settlement, the state of Illinois was 65% original tall grass prairie. Today, the statistic I found was it’s the State of Illinois is less than .01% of tall grass prairie. So, in other words, it’s almost nonexistent. So the predominant ecosystem and community of plants that existed before European settlement in the State of Illinois is now essentially gone.

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Also, most of the plants that we grow and propagate, and I’m talking about the plants we find in garden centers and nurseries. They’re not natives. They’ve been introduced from all over the world. There’s nothing wrong with that. For instance, a lot of our houseplants originate really from one temperate rain forest region of the Himalayan foothills.

It’s interesting how many of our houseplants we take for granted come from one specific area. Tomatoes obviously aren’t really native plants to North America, and a lot of the annuals that I love and all of us love in our gardens like begonias and chrysanthemums, these are all nonnative plants. So, actually, it’s quite rare that we come across real native plants, especially in gardening centers and nurseries where most of us shop for our garden supplies.

So native plants are plants that have evolved over a period of thousands of years in a specific geographic area, and in this instance, I’m going to refer to the geographic area of the North American continent. I hope that definition is clear about native plants, and so we’ve defined them.

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And now I’d like to suggest some reasons why you want to garden with native plants. So in the first place, first big reason, native plants will be likely adapted to your area. That means they may be accustomed to your climate. They’ll be used to your hardiness zone, your average rainfall, and a whole host of other environmental factors. I’ll give you a quick example of what I mean, and we’re all aware that the State of California’s undergoing I believe the most severe drought it’s experienced I think I saw in the New York Times 1,200 years. The governor, in fact, today just signed some sort of bill that restricts water usage by 25% or something. It’s amazing.

Nonnative lawns and gardens in California are suffering from lack of water, and will suffer even more in the future. So people are tearing up their lawns, and they’re establishing native landscaping. Essentially, they’re growing plants that require much less water, plants that have evolved naturally in an arid climate which is their specific geographic kind of climate. So native plants will likely be adapted to where you live.

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Secondly, I mentioned earlier, and I’m going to touch on this several times. Native plants evolved as communities with other organisms as parts of communities. An important part of these communities of course are the insects who provide pollination.

Therefore, regionally native plants in your garden may well attract some of the pollinators, the insects that evolved with them. And here’s the important thing about that. That means native plants are often very attractive to local butterflies. And I think butterflies add so much movement and beauty to any container in any garden and anything we can plant that attracts them is a huge plus. A terrific example of a plant that attracts butterflies is the milkweed plant, and you guys may know that that’s food source for the Monarch butterfly. So, if you garden with native plants, you may find you have an increased population of butterflies or other insect pollinators like bumblebees, etcetera.

Another reason for growing native plants, and this is a good one, is that because they did evolve with local insects, they may have more resistance and

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be less vulnerable to insect pests. Also, they’ll probably be less vulnerable to local diseases as well. Consequently, and I love this part of it, native plants may require less care, and they may require less pesticides. I try to use little to no pesticides myself. One of the benefits of native plants is that they will be more resistant to local diseases and pests. That being said, there are exotic pests that have been introduced into your environment like Japanese beetles that natives may not have developed defenses against. And if you folks if any of you live in the eastern seaboard, particularly you’ll know that Japanese beetles are horrific, and nothing seems to be safe from them. So there are exotic pests. Natives won’t necessarily be resistant to those. But they may have defenses against local pests.

And finally, native plants, and I think this is maybe the best reason to try growing a few, native plants are o0ften beautiful. There are just so many wild flowers that are native to North America that are just gorgeous. Black-Eyed Susan’s, goldenrod, false indigo, lupines, and I think all of these flowers are just as dramatic and exotic looking as any flower

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imported from the South Pacific or from Asia. So natives are beautiful.

Just to expand on those regions briefly that I mentioned, the California Native Plant Society has come up with just five bullet points for why you should plant native, and they are – they pretty much echo what I’ve just said. They save water. They’re low maintenance. They provide pesticide freedom. They’re good for wildlife viewing, and they support the local ecology. I think those are fantastic reasons to grow anything, and particularly great reasons to grow plants that are native to our continent.

Before I go any further, we should ask ourselves are all natives fantastic? And the answer is no. Not necessarily at least not to grow in our garden. First of all, some natives are endangered, and that means so little of their habitat and population exists that they have the potential for extinction. So I would like to interject a word in this part of the presentation about acquiring native plants, and I’ll be talking about acquiring a little later in the talk also. But here’s the cardinal rule. Never harvest or take native plants from wild areas. So native plants

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can be endangered, and native plants occurring in wild areas and in their natural state are extremely rare, and they’re precious. They should be left undisturbed.

In fact, I’m sure you guys know there are many prohibitions in state and federal parks against harvesting native plants, so please don’t walk away from this webinar and think, gee I’m going to go grab some plants out of the woods and put them in my garden. Do not pick them. If you want to grow natives, you’ll need to purchase your plants from a nursery that specializes in propagating them.

So not all natives are terrific under some circumstances, and there’s a few other reasons why some natives are not terrific. Certainly not as garden plants, and that is, because some are harmful. And they’re harmful to people although they may be harmless to insects or other animals such as birds. And of course, a classic example of this is poison ivy. Poison ivy is a native plant, but it’s certainly not something we want to cultivate in our own garden even though the birds enjoy the berries very much, and it is a food source for animals.

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Some natives are undesirable, because they are invasive. That means they will take over, and they will crowd out your other plants if they’re not controlled. I can’t tell you how many hours I have spent pulling up and digging and cutting back Virginia Creeper from the corner of my garden that actually was so aggressive it was covering and killing a really large almost 40 foot tall spruce tree, and every year I go back, and it keeps coming up. It must have a root system that’s unbelievable. I spend days and days cutting it back every spring and in the fall, and it keeps wanting to return. So natives can be invasive. So be very careful about what you introduce into your garden, and make sure that you’re not introducing something that’s going to take over.

Finally, some natives don’t make terrific garden plants, because they’re delicate, or they require very specific growing conditions to thrive. Native orchids specifically are like this. The lady slipper orchids, it’s very difficult to cultivate those in your garden. It can be done, but it’s not something that a beginner would attempt. It’s certainly not something I even attempt. I don’t have that much

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time. Some plants have conditions that are very difficult to duplicate in a garden environment, conditions like specific soil composition or humidity.

We’ve talked about why you want to grow natives, and why you might not want to. So I’d like to talk briefly and specifically about growing native plants in containers. That’s because I teach container gardening, and I think containers are more accessible for everyone, and it’s less of a daunting idea to grow a few natives in a container rather than to start a whole garden bed. A lot of us, we may not have an entire garden bed that we want to fill with natives, or we may not live in California, and we may not want to tear up our lawn and fill it with native landscaping. But it might be nice to duplicate just a little bit of a wild environment in a container. So even if you live, or if you live, in a condo or an apartment, you don’t have a lot of garden space, you can have a container that duplicates in a small way part of a natural ecosystem. A container, for instance, that’s a miniature prairie, or a miniature desert, or a shady woodland, and I think that’s a fun idea.

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And because I’m going to focus on containers, and because we have limits on the amount of time for this discussion, I already said I wasn’t going to talk about natives that aren’t native to North America. I’m also not going to talk about trees or shrubs that are native to North America. There just isn’t enough time, and there are wonderful native shrubs and trees that I encourage you to try if you have space. But, again, I think that’s a discussion for another day.

The first rule for gardening with natives is get a large container. As large as you can manage. The larger container the better. And there’s a few reasons for this. A lot of natives are perennials. That means they come back every year. They overwinter, and their root systems need to survive through the winter, so they need to grow deeply. A lot of the annuals we buy begonias are a great example, for instance. They originated on the forest floors of temperate rain forests, and those particular ecosystems have very shallow topsoil’s, and of course they don’t have winter. The temperature is equatorial, and it’s constant all the time. So they don’t have to have big root systems. But a lot of our native plants, of course, since they

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have evolved in areas with winter and cold temperatures, they made deep root systems, so we need good sized containers.

Also, natives are more fun to grow as communities. I told you I’d be coming back to this concept. And so, you need a big enough container to hopefully plant several different species at least. I’ve been doing some research about growing mediums when we’re growing natives, and there is some debate about growing mediums out there. But most of what I’ve read basically indicates not using dirt from your yard. It makes sort of intuitive sense to plant natives in soil that you’ve taken from your geographic region, your yard, because that would be the environment they have evolved in. But most soils around areas of residential construction have been disturbed, and they really may not replicate or even be similar to the natural soils that were there before we started building everywhere. And they probably won’t contain the composition that wild plants need, or it’s possible.

So, I think ultimately, commercial potting mix is really the way to go when you’re experimenting with natives. Commercial potting mix is usually

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well balanced. It retains moisture. It’s easy to work with. It’s sort of a no brainer. It’s not going to duplicate the actual soil composition of where natives grow, but it’s generally all purpose. Here’s a big important factor. Commercial potting mix weighs a lot less than topsoil or your regular garden soil. So if you need to move your container, and you might, it’s going to be a lot lighter filled with commercial potting mix.

You’re going to need to plan your native containers with the same kind of planning guidelines that you use when you plan regular containers. And that is anything you put in a single container has to have similar growing conditions. So if you put three or four types of natives in your container, they do need to have a similar need for moisture, sunlight, temperature, wind exposure, etcetera. You don’t want to have a shade loving plant mixed in with two sun loving plants. Something’s not going to thrive in there, and the container won’t be a happy one. And it probably won’t look as nice as it could either.

When you’re choosing native plants, or thinking about native plants, don’t forget to think about

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foliage as well as flowers. I mentioned earlier native plants are often beautiful, and we know there are certainly many wildflowers that I think are just breathtaking. One of the great things about native plants is that many natives have lovely foliage, particularly foliage that has different color like bronze and silver and blue green. So when you’re planting your container, don’t be afraid to go with natives that don’t have any flowers at all, but may have just wonderful foliage.

I think foliage is great to think about when you’re planting your container for a number of reasons. The first is foliage lasts a lot longer through the growing season than most flowers will or blooms will. You’re going to have foliage from start to finish. You don’t have to worry about something blooming for effect over a period of three or four weeks, and then that’s it. So foliage lasts a long time. You’ll get a big bang for your buck. Foliage often changes color with the seasons, so your container can actually change visually over the course of your growing year, and in fact foliage may be like we know with maple trees. It may be an entirely different color in the fall than in the spring or summer.

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And finally, I think we don’t do this enough, but take into account the wonderful sensory nature of foliage. Flowers are fine, but flowers are usually pretty delicate. Most flowers. They don’t put up with a lot of manhandling. But leaves and stems I think are more often more fun to feel and to hold. And they also have an auditory nature to them too. Listening to a breeze rustle through leaves is just an unbeatable pleasure.

We’ve learned what you might want to choose when you’re planting natives. I mentioned similar growing conditions, but ideally you do want some variety with your plants. Not with growing conditions, but with the plants themselves, and I think particularly with regard to height and differences in foliage.

So there’s three words I’m going to tell you, and I’m sure you’ve heard them before. I’m embarrassed. I hadn’t really heard these until last year. They describe a way of designing a container, and if you can remember these three words, you can always design a container that’s going to be

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fantastic. And the words are thriller, filler, and spiller. So if you haven’t heard these words before thriller, filler, and spiller, this is just an easy way of remembering how to compose a visually and tactilely appealing container.

So what do those words mean? The thriller is usually a tall plant that you plant in the center of your container, and it gives you that upright visual effect. And the filler is a medium sized or bushy plants that you fill in around the thriller and gives you sort of a full effect. And the spiller is a plant that you can plant on the edges of your container, so the foliage and flowers fall over the edge of your container, and you have a really full beautiful little garden all in one container. And so, if you plan a container that contains all three, the thriller, the filler, the spiller - I’ll stop saying that I promise – you’re creating a full container. It has foliage and appeal all season long.

One last thing I need to mention if you’re going to try containers. I did mention some natives need to overwinter, because they are perennials or biennials, and therefore, you may need to protect your containers from extreme cold, so as I said,

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you might have to be prepared to move them into a more sheltered area for the winter.

I hope I have got you a little interested in native plants, and what they are, and why you might want to think about growing them. And just a little basic idea of how to grow them, so I hope I’ve peaked your interest and you’re saying to yourself it’s spring. Maybe I should try out a few natives in my garden or in my containers. So hopefully, now you’re thinking what kind of natives should I grow? What should I chose? Here’s a problem with that question. It’s a good one, but it really depends on your environment. Obviously, if you live in the Southwest, you’re going to want to plant succulents like cacti or other native species. If you live in the temperate zone, you have tons of choices. And I’d like to spend a little time now today talking about some of my favorites and because they’re my favorites I’m going to focus on natives that grow well in my region which is the northern Midwest. But before some of you may feel left out. I hope you don’t. Most of the plants I’m going to mention in this discussion can be grown in many parts of North America.

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Let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about some of the kinds of plants and flowers that might be fun for you to try in your garden or your container. I’m going to pause and take a glass of water before my voice gets all dried out. Okay, thank you. So the first native I’d like to talk about is actually in the grass family, and it’s called bluestem. There’s a variety called little bluestem, and there’s a larger variety.

And, if you remember, I promised I wouldn’t say those words again. But, I did talk about thrillers, fillers, and spillers, and bluestem is definitely a thriller. It has a really nice growing height, and you would want to plant it in the middle of your container. It grows two to three feet high and has a beautiful color. The leaves are blue green, and then in the fall, they turn red orange. So bluestem makes a lovely display throughout your growing season and even into the winter which is fantastic. The seed heads of the bluestem are fluffy. They’re very ornamental, and they have a real great tactile appeal as well. If you remember I talked about natives attracting butterflies, and bluestem is definitely a plant that will attract butterflies, and because of the seed heads it will attract birds as

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well.

One of the great things about bluestem is its drought tolerant, so it’s easy to care for. I like having a tall wavy centerpiece in my containers. Remember I talked about the sound of breezes blowing through foliage. Well, bluestem to me, this is the number one native in my book for that kind of auditory experience. It has a lovely sound when it’s in the breeze. So you can’t go wrong with bluestem. Try it out. It’ll grow pretty well all the way almost from Georgia to Alberta Canada and everywhere in between, and I really recommend it as a thriller.

Okay, another thriller, and I guess I’m just going to have to say I’m going to say those words a lot. I wrote them down more than I thought. One of my favorite natives that’s a thriller is a prairie wildflower, and it’s called Prairie Blazing Star, or the Latin name is Liatrice. I don’t know how it’s pronounced. It’s L, I, A, T, R, I, C, E. But the common name is Blazing Star, and if you find if you’re looking to purchase it, that’s what you’ll find normally listed as the plants a thriller, because again, it can grow to a height of two feet or more.

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It is a perennial, and this plant has just wonderful tall spikes of beautiful purple blooms. And butterflies love it. My Blazing Star is always surrounded by butterflies of all shapes and sizes when it’s in full bloom and has a really purple, purple, color, so it’s just a terrific purple. It’s hard in gardens sometimes to find true versions of colors. They often are mixes of a bunch of different things. But the Blazing Start is just terrific.

It also makes a wonderful cut flower. The foliage is also nice, because it has really think grass like leaves which will work well if you have some fillers with larger and broader leaves. And one of the great things about Blazing Star is that it’s a pretty popular perennial. So even though it’s a native, it can be found at most nurseries and most garden centers. I’ve seen it at some of the big box garden centers that I won’t mention. But I’ve seen it almost everywhere. So Blazing Star is an easy one to try out, because it’s easy to find, and it is a perennial. It hopefully will overwinter and come back bigger and better next year. So give it a try.

The third native I’d like to talk about is one that’s less well known, but it is available, and it’s called

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Butterfly Weed. This is another thriller, because it can grow up to three feet high. You want it in the center of your container. Butterfly Weed is actually a variety of milkweed, and remember we talked about milkweed briefly, and the reason that Butterfly Weed is terrific is for the same reason that milkweed is. It’s aptly named.

Butterfly Weed attracts huge amounts of butterflies. There’s also a lot of nectar I guess. It’s lovely. It has really great orange red and almost a flame red or flame orange flower which little flowers that are sort of arranged in a flat saucer patter on top of a stem. Butterflies go nuts over it. The foliage is also larval food for queen and Monarch Butterflies, so it does double duty in terms of creating habitat for insects in your community. That being said, if you don’t like coming across a squishy caterpillar while you’re tending to your plants you might not want to choose this one, but I think the benefits outweigh that particular hazard.

Butterfly weed is just fantastic. It’s a prairie flower. It occurs naturally in the Midwest. When the stems are broken off, they don’t have that sticky milk

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that’s typical with milkweed, so they also make a really nice cut flower as well. One word of caution, however. Butterfly Weed does not transplant well. So, it’s best if it’s grown from seed, and direct seeded into your container. It takes a while, and more of a commitment. If you can find a large container of Butterfly Weed that’s already established that would be a fantastic option.

Choice number three, and that is Coreopsis. Coreopsis is a wonderful plant. It’s a filler not a thriller, because it’s ten to 18 inches tall. It has large spreading clumps of bright yellow daisy like flowers. It is an incredibly cheerful plant. It’s so cheerful. And it’s very rugged. It’s incredibly hardy and very easy to grow.

One of the great things about Coreopsis is that it’s also self-seeding, so you can easily establish a large bed or a large container with Coreopsis, and it’ll come back from its own seed every year. I use Moon Beam Coreopsis, and I have used that, because it blooms consistently all summer long. Coreopsis will flower more fully if the flowers are deadheaded, so you have to do a little maintenance with Coreopsis and take some time to

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take off the dead blooms. They’re very easy to feel. They dry up quite nicely, and it’s very easy to distinguish from the newer blooms. Again, Coreopsis makes terrific cut flowers. Don’t be afraid to try it, and you can sometimes obtain Coreopsis in a regular garden center.

Plant number four, and I should say these are all plants for sunny locations. I’m going to talk about some nice choices for shady locations too. A terrific plant and wildflower, and I think actually my personal favorite is the purple coneflower. This plant is also called Echinacea. Everyone’s heard that word before. I have many reasons why I like the purple coneflowers. They are wonderful plants. But the main reason is the flowers themselves. This is a flower that I like, because of its blooms not because of its foliage. The flowers are large pink slash purple daisy like flowers. They’re almost sometimes as large as a tea saucer. They have a really nice orange-ish raised center. The raised center may almost be as big as the surface of a ping pong ball. And the blooms, the flower petals slope down and away from the orange raised center.

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I think this flower has probably the best tactile features of any flower out there. That raised center has this terrific texture. It kind of feels like a puffy, prickly pincushion. It’s terrific to rub your fingers and thumbs across the surface of it. I probably sound nuts, but I do do that. Just because it feels so great. So it’s a terrific flower for tactile purposes. Of course, make sure you’re not sharing the space with a bee when you’re doing that. Again, I think coneflower has the best tactile appeal out there.

Purple coneflowers are drought tolerant, and for the most part pest and disease free. I’ve had a little bit of problem with mildew, but my garden has a high humidity level. I’m very near one of the Great Lakes. I also like some of these other plants purple coneflowers are a magnet for butterflies, and those wonderful seed heads. Those centers of the blooms when they dry out they attract songbirds. Also an excellent cut flower. These days there are actually lots of varieties that have been bread from the original native that have different colored blooms. Mostly reds and oranges. For purists that’s not technically native. But you know

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what if you prefer a little bit of variety, I’ve got purple and red and orange coneflowers all planted in the same bed, and they just make a terrific display.

Finally, coneflowers do multiply very well. That means you get more flowers every three years or so that you’ll have to divide, and you can have additional plants for containers or stuff to give away to your friends. I just said that these I’ve discussed so far plants that require full sun, and if you remember, I said you do have to pick plants for your containers that have similar growing conditions or that require similar growing conditions. So if you have a shady area, and you’d like to grow some natives in a container in the shade, you’ll need some different choices.

So for shady areas, I’ll say right off the bat that for tactile and visual appeal for containers that require shade, you can’t go wrong with ferns. Ferns are fantastic, and this is where remember I said, “Sometimes it’s better to focus on foliage,” and of course with ferns, that’s what we’re doing. The foliage is the huge appeal. A great fern to try is the maidenhair fern.

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It’s a wonderful native, and it qualifies as a thriller, because it grows up to two feet high or higher. It does like moist shady soil. And here’s the thing, a lot of the tactile appeal of the maidenhair fern comes from its stems. Not the fronds itself, but the stems, because they’re shiny and black and kind of slippery and smooth. I think they have a terrific tactile quality, and it’s very hard to hurt them. I’ve read the stems of maidenhair ferns can be used for basket weaving. So they are very strong and will take a lot of abuse. The foliage is a lovely deep green. It makes a wonderful companion for low growing flowering, shade loving plants, and you can’t go wrong with maidenhair.

There’s another fern I’d like to mention, and that’s also a personal favorite. I’m telling you they’re all my personal favorites, and that’s true of course. But it sort of loses its impact after a while. So my personal favorite of ferns, second most personal favorite, is the ostrich fern. The ostrich ferns are terrific, again, because of their tactile quality. The fronds of the ostrich fern have large upright growth patterns, and the stems are all covered with a soft fuzz which is really fun. The young fronds when

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they come out of the soil, they’re tightly coiled in that fiddlehead shape which also is a terrific tactile growth pattern.

Those are two thrillers for your shade loving container. If you’re looking for a filler, you can’t go wrong with native or purple violets. Violets are very strong and hardy. They’re low growing. They’ll fill out the container. The foliage will grow over the edges of the container, and of course, violets have beautiful flowers that are also edible.

Violet blossoms make a wonderful garnish on salads. Did you know they’re edible? They are. At least I hope they are. Don’t go out and eat them without checking, but actually I’m almost positive they are. I have eaten them myself. Some people make candied violets even they decorate deserts with. Violets do double duty. They’re edible, and they have lovely flowers, and they’re very hard to get rid of. These are invasive, so they’re best grown in containers. I’m continually digging out violets from corners of my garden where I don’t want them, because they’re self-seeding, and the birds take their seeds all over the place and drop them, and then they come up everywhere. They’re

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very strong. Another terrific shade loving native that’s also a filler is woodland phlox. It’s in the phlox family, woodland phlox. It grows only six inches to a foot high. It blooms in the spring, and it attracts hummingbirds.

I’m going to run out of time, so I want to talk about a few others for shades. I’ve got just two I want to mention really quick. The first one is coral bells. The Latin name is Heuchera. Here’s the great thing about coral bells. It can be a sun or shade loving native depending on the variety you get. Some do well in the sun. Some do well in the shade, and this is a plant that you plant for its foliage rather than its flowers. It has really large, broad, flat leaves that are upright, and the leaves can have wonderful patterns on them. They can be variegated. That means with stripes or changes of pattern. Coral bells are very tough. I’ve chopped them up with a shovel, and they have these tuberous roots that they grow out of. I’ve chopped up those roots and stuck pieces of those roots in the ground elsewhere in my garden, and they come up no problem. They grow in shade if you buy coral bells with light colored leaves, lime green leaves. Those are beautiful leaves, and those kinds

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of coral bells grow well in shade. If you buy a coral bell that is dark purple or blackish almost leaves, and those are amazingly dramatic, those grow well in sun. So coral bells can tolerate lots of abuse, and they are very versatile. They’re a wonderful native. They do have flowers. They don’t last long, but they’re very thin stems with little bell like flowers on them that come up in the spring. Again, I don’t plant them for their flowers. I plant them for their foliage.

One more for the shade, and that is sedum. There are many varieties, and sedum grows throughout the northern hemisphere not just in North America. But in North America there’s a native variety called woodland stonecrop, and it’s very shade tolerant. Again, I like this for its tactile qualities. It has round fleshy sort of succulent leaves that are really great. It’s hardy to zone four, so it can take a lot of cold temperatures. It grows two to six inches high, so it’s a terrific filler for your container.

I did want to mention one – I have a long, long list, but I really can’t go through them all. I’ll save four for bright sun, I forgot one columbine. Everyone should get some columbine seed. At the grocery

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store, you can find it everywhere. It’s a wonderful native. It’ll grow in cracks of the sidewalk. It has beautiful flowers. Yellow, red, orange, purple, blooms in mid spring. The foliage turns to maroon in fall. I’m going fast now, because I’m looking at the clock. I know I’m running out of time.

Columbine is not particular about soil, and you can just sow the seeds directly. Here’s what I love about columbine most. It is a real favorite for hummingbirds. So if you like to attract hummingbirds columbine is almost guaranteed to bring them in. It is hardly to zone three which means you can grow it as far north as northern Canada. So columbine, you can’t go wrong.

I’ve hurriedly talked about some of the plants I recommend that I’ve tried that I really love, and a lot of them you’ve noticed it’s not just the blooms, it’s the tactile nature of the plants which I think is just as important. Gardening, and I’ve said this in some other webinars. Gardening is primarily a tactile activity. It’s something you do with your hands, and the beautiful thing about plants is that they respond to that, and they give back to you so much more than just a visual appeal.

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Hopefully now you’re thinking I do want to plant some natives, and you’re thinking where do I get mine? So here’s the hard answer to that question, and that is you’re going to have to be a bit of a detective. I mentioned that Blazing Star or cone flower, those are pretty popular commercial plants. You’ll find them at any garden center or nursery. But remember the key to natives is that they are regionally specific. So ideally, you do need to find a grower or a nursery that’s active right in your area.

So here’s what I recommend you do. I tried looking up some general resources I could present to you. I have one website that I think is a good one. But for all of you, you really need to focus on natives that are regionally specific. At least a little bit. So the great thing is that there are native plant societies in every state in every province. And all you need to do is open up your search engine and type in let’s say you live in Illinois. Type in Illinois Native Plant Society, and you will come up with a whole list of very nice people that belong to organizations. People and organizations that already are interested in native plants in your specific geographic area, and they will know

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exactly how to get natives and where to obtain them. And there are nurseries and garden centers all over North America all over the place that will be growing natives that are suited to your conditions. So type in Native Plant Society and the name of your state or your region, and I guarantee you’ll come up with some resources.

That being said, there’s a pretty good website I found called Plant Native dot org. I’ve not tried it with JAWS, but it does work fairly well with voiceover. And the reason being is that the upper right hand corner of the website does have a text only option which is wonderful. You hit that option, it’ll eliminate a lot of steps, graphics and visuals as you swipe through the material. There is a dropdown list where you can type in your zip code or your state, and it’ll immediately give you a database of all the growers and sources of native plants in the region that you typed in. So it’s very helpful.

Another terrific website, a place to start, is Wildflower dot org, but honestly, it’s pretty tedious to use with voiceover, and I imagine very tedious with JAWS as well. It’s actually the organization

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started by Lady Bird Johnson who was the wife of President Lyndon Johnson. She was very, very fond of wildflowers, and there’s a foundation that is committed to her interest. It is a very informational site, but not so accessible with Screen Reader, the one I tried. At any rate, find a database that has nurseries and growers in your area. If you are lucky enough to live near a large botanic garden, I can’t recommend enough visiting a botanic garden. I’ll give you an example. Hadley is located very hear the Chicago Botanic Garden, and they have a native garden within the botanic garden. I believe they have three different native gardens. One is a prairie garden. The other is a woodland garden, and the third is I think the greatest. That’s the habitat garden, and that is a collection of native plants designed to create a habitat for other organisms like butterflies and birds, etcetera. So any opportunity you have to actually visit a native garden already in existence will give you as really good idea of what’s going to work for you, what’s going to thrive, and you’ll without question find someone there who is nuts about native plants who is more than willing to share all of their advice and experience and give you some insight into growing something that’s going to work for you.

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In closing with this webinar, I hoped to get you interested in trying to create just your own little bit of a wild environment. It would be wonderful if you thought about using a container or a small garden bed to recreate a part of our world that’s sadly now for the most part lost to us. As I’ve said many times native plants have evolved as parts of communities, and those communities have many members. Insects, animals, plants, even bacteria and fungi. So when you garden with native plants, you are in a small way recreating a community. You’ve become part of a world that includes not just plants but also native butterflies and birds among others. So as Dawn mentioned at the intro, I’d like you to think beyond the confines of your local garden center, and maybe just dedicate a little bit of your garden space to plants that grew herein North America before most of our ancestors arrived. I know you’ll find it exciting, and I’m pretty sure you’ll find it to be pretty fun. So thanks very much.

Dawn TurcoWell, my goodness gracious, this is why I love Ed’s seminars so much. They are so packed full of

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information, and we get to know Ed pretty well too. I’ve enjoyed obviously hearing all of your recommendations, and I’m enthusiastic. I’m hoping that participants today are as enthusiastic. We did come up to the hour, but I’m going to open the mike just in case there’s a pressing question. If we don’t have time, or you think of one later, I’m going to explain in a moment how you can get us that question after the fact, or if you’re listening to the recorded version of this seminar. So Ed thank you for sharing with us so much. It’s like wheel barrel full of information on native plants today. I particularly enjoyed your Illinois examples.

Thank you for those of us who work out of the Hadley central office, and we can take advantage of those recommendations and examples. Folks we time this seminar today for those of us who are a little anxious to get going with some planting. It’s been a long rather chilly spring for us here in the Chicago area, but there is hope of sunnier days ahead. And for you and your more northern location as well Ed, so we’ll be thinking of you in the weeks to come as you’re getting out there and doing your thing.

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I am going to hand the microphone back to Ed in just a minute for a farewell. Also a reminder that our seminars are archived at the past seminars site on the Hadley website, and it just takes us a day or two to get it up there, so feel free to relisten to it, because I know I’m going to have to. As much as I got the thriller, the filler, and the spillers, I’m going to need to hear some of those plants over again. So recommend it to others or listen again, or if you feel the urge take the container gardening course that Ed teaches. That would be fun as well. Of course, feedback. That’s where if you think of something later send it to feedback@Hadley.edu, and I will pass it on to Ed. And then finally as we all get into social media, we have a hashtag for our seminars and that is hashtag SeminarsAtHadley, hashtag Ed Haines, hashtag Grow Wild. Maybe that’s what we should do Grow Wild. Ed I’m handing it back to you.

Ed HainesWell, thanks Dawn, and thanks everyone for listening, and Alice and Deborah I appreciate your comments. I just encourage all of you if you don’t have space to garden yourself you can’t go wrong by going out to visit a garden this spring. It won’t

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be a waste of time. Get out there in nature just a little bit. You can’t go wrong.

Dawn TurcoThank you again Ed, and we will look forward to anyone who is participating today in our next Seminars At Hadley, so thank you very much and goodbye.

[End of Audio– 01:00:02]

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