Author: Margaret Molyson

1/3/22 “Pioneer Species,” now doesn’t that sound very American? Don’t you picture flowers hitching a ride in a covered wagon going over the Oregon Trail? No? They don’t have thumbs! Sorry for the 6th-grade humor, but that visual was how the term struck me many, many, many years ago when I first heard it in my college ecology class. Now, a zillion years later, I come back across it reading a book, Garden Revolution (highly recommended) by Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher in their discussion of cardinal flowers. Larry Weaner’s Garden Revolution and How Landscapes Can Be a Source of Environmental Change – Garden Collage Magazine The thing about pioneer species is that they go through their life cycle quickly, a few years, then die. If you don’t know that about a plant, you can’t see why it failed; you think that either you killed it or that it can’t…

Blue mistflower (Conoclinium coelestinum) is also known as hardy ageratum. This beautiful blue flowering native perennial is a prodigious bloomer with the staying power of eight weeks of flowers from late summer until frost. It is a valuable fall nectar source for butterflies and skippers, and other pollinators such as our native bees. The flower is in the composite family, but the flower head has only disk flowers and no ray flowers (petals). The flower can be blue, pink, purple, or white. Most sources say mistflower plants prefer moist, humusy soils that do not dry out in full sun to partial shade, although you can find a source that says they are drought resistant. I have it in both types of growing conditions, and it thrives in both. It never grows more than three feet tall and does well along ponds, in wildflower gardens, or naturalized areas. This is not…