Winter sowing is the “natural” alternative to scarification and stratification. If you have seeds that call for either or both, winter sowing is a great alternative, particularly if you do not have the space or money to have a rack of plant grow lights set up in your home or a temperature and moisture-controlled greenhouse. When we scarify seed coats, we mimic the natural weakening of the seed coat that happens out in nature due to the freeze-thaw cycle of winter. Stratification mimics the chill days of winter. So, why not let the real winter do the work? If you are working with native seeds from the southeast, they already have built into their DNA the naturally cool, warm, cold, freezing, warm fluctuations of the southeast winter weather. Do not worry that they will sprout; then a freeze will kill them. These are NOT non-native tropical plants fooled by Mother…
Category: Newsletters and Member Articles
Pioneer Species: Part 1 – Wildflowers
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…
Bluemist Flower
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…