Blog - Page 2 of 6 - Wild Roots

Fall is the Time for Planting, and We’ve Got Plants!

Fall is the best time to plant perennials as it gives them the most time to establish themselves before the high stresses of summer heat.? Good news: we have some limited quantities of great, wildlife-friendly native plants and shrubs still available for sale at discounted prices.? If you’d like to purchase, send an email to me at [email protected] with what you’d like.? You can pick up, or we offer free delivery within 10 minutes of Collingswood with purchases over $25.? I’ll update this post if we sell out of any of these species. Grasses and Wildflowers Coastal Panic Grass (Panicum amarum), gallon pots? – $7 each, or 3 for $21 This is a great drought-tolerant ornamental grass for sunny spots.? Use it as an accent or plant in masses.? More info Wild Blue Indigo (Baptisia australis), quart pots – $5 each, or 3 for $13 A late spring blooming wildflower that after a few years grows to more shrub-like proportions in bright sun or part shade.? Beautiful stalks of purplish blue flowers attract pollinators, and the seeds provide food for birds in the summer and fall.? It’s also a nitrogen fixing plant.? This is a bullet-proof, easy to grow native. More info Coral Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens), quart pots – $5 each, or 3 for $13 Much more manageable than the invasive Japanese variety, this vine produces red flowers that attract hummingbirds throughout the summer.? Can handle part shade, but produces the most flowers in full sun.? It needs a structure or fence to climb on, and can reach heights of up to $30 feet.? More info Trees and Shrubs Paw Paw (Asimina triloba), 3 gallon pot? – $20 A small understory tree that is a host plant to several native butterfly species.? It also produces a delicious, custardy fruit that’s been likened to bananas.? Warning: you do need two genetically distinct specimens to produce fruit, and we have only one tree available.? More info High Bush Blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum), 3 gallon pots – $26 or 2 for $49 Everybody loves blueberries!? These are gorgeous shrubs with spring flowers, fall color, attractive architectural branches, and of course, delicious fruits.? At least two plants are needed to produce fruit, and they do require acid soils, which, if you don’t naturally have them, can be created in several ways.? More info Sweet…

Ice Age Sand Dunes: Hidden Gems In the Pines

Tim Ifill

Walking down a dirt road through the pine barrens in Brendan Byrne State Forest, all of a sudden, the woods open up, and we’re standing in a sandy open area with virtually no vegetation.? People lucky enough to be familiar with the area know that “pine barrens” is a bit of a misnomer given the vibrant plant and animal communities that thrive there.? But my first impression of this clearing is that it’s, well, pretty barren. A small group of participants in the Rutgers Environmental Stewards Program is touring the pine barrens, and Emile DeVito, ecologist and Manager of Science and Stewardship for the New Jersey Conservation Foundation is our guide.? And we couldn’t ask for a more knowledgeable one. What we’re standing on, Dr. DeVito informs us, is a paleolithic sand dune, a remnant of the forces that shaped the landscape during the last ice age.? While the ice sheets themselves never reached this far south, the spot where we were standing was only about 70 miles from a wall of ice thousands of feet high.? Hurricane-force winds regularly scoured the sandy former sea floor that makes up southern New Jersey’s coastal plain.? Sand from wetlands was piled up into nearby dunes, many of which persist today. And sure enough, just a couple hundred yards from the dune area is a vernal pool.? Inundated in the winter and spring but mostly dry in the summer, it has no outlet or connection to nearby waterways, and therefore no fish.? So it makes an ideal breeding ground for frogs and toads.? I made a mental note to bring Mae to this spot in the spring to hear the frog symphony. As for the dune itself, despite appearances, it’s far from barren – in fact it’s a haven for several rare species.? In this particualr area, Dr. DeVito points out a population of Pickering’s Morning Glory (Stylisma pickeringii), one of the many rare species of plants that can be found in the pines.? There are only a handful of populations left, and off-road vehicles are a particular threat.? The plants were going dormant now, but we did see a number of seedpods, which will hopefully lead to new seedlings in the spring. Dr. DeVito also pointed out the den of a northern pine snake, another threatened species and an excellent burrower.? Growing up to five feet long, their coloring allows them to…

New Studies Weigh Ecological Value of Native Cultivars

Tim Ifill

I recently wrote about the key differences between native cultivars and straight species and why we should care. My conclusion was that while it wasn’t necessary to completely eschew cultivars of native species (sometimes referred to as nativars), if you wanted your garden to provide crucial ecosystem services, like supporting pollinators, you should be sure to include a significant number of straight species plants, ideally from local ecotypes, or geographic origins, if possible. It makes intuitive sense that if you want to support wildlife and natural processes (and you should!), you’d want the plants you select to reflect those processes, as opposed to choosing genetically indistinct clones that may exhibit unusual characteristics. But is there a scientific basis for this? Luckily this is a question that a few intrepid scientists are beginning to address. Doug Tallamy, entomologist and celebrated author of Bringing Nature Home, has been studying caterpillar interactions with native plants and their cultivars alongside graduate student Emily Baisden at Delaware’s Mt. Cuba Center. And Annie White recently completed doctoral research at the University of Vermont which tracked pollinator visits to straight species and cultivars in the context of pollinator restoration projects. Hopefully this will be the start of even more robust research, but early results, which should be of great interest to land managers, the ecological restoration community, and even home gardeners, are highlighting the value of straight species while not dismissing cultivars out of hand. Tallamy’s findings are preliminary, but they show that different characteristics of cultivars can have different effects on how they fit into the ecosystem. In terms of cultivars with distinct plant size or habits, caterpillars had no preference between them and the straight species. The same went for specimens selected for disease resistance, which is good news for the folks working to restore elm and chestnut populations. Leaf color, however, was an area where differences started to come through. Cultivars with purple leaves, for instance, were not nearly as attractive as their green straight species counterparts. This could be the result of visual cues, or as Tallamy suggests, the unpalatibility of the specific chemical compounds that lead to those unusual colors. Variegation in leaves (streaks of color) was less conclusive. Some caterpillar species actually preferred the variegated cultivars, though most avoided them (and since they contain less chlorophyll, they’re probably less nutritious). White’s research in Vermont focused not on caterpillars and leaves, but…

A Plant’s A Plant, Right? Cultivars, Straight Species, Ecotypes, and Maximizing Your Garden’s Ecological Value

Tim Ifill

Okay, so you’ve decided to add some native plants to your yard, or maybe even a lot.? Great!? But then you roll up to the garden center, start browsing the selection, and wind up glued to your phone, engaged in endless plant species Google searches and more confused than ever. If you’re lucky enough that your garden center even carries more than a handful of natives, you should just buy them, right?? A native plant’s a native plant, isn’t it? I’m sorry to say that it’s not quite that easy. As with anything else, there are folks that will passionately argue about some of these topics at length. In this post, I just want to try to make things a bit simpler for you. What’s a Cultivar? First things first: If you’re buying a native plant at a big box garden center or even at many independent garden centers, there’s a really good chance you’re buying a cultivar.? That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but here’s what you should know.? Cultivars (a portmanteau of ‘cultivated variety’) are almost always clones, sometimes of a naturally occurring variety of a plant and sometimes of a hybridized or selectively bred specimen.? The alternative would be a ‘straight species’ plant, which you could call the garden variety plant. You can tell that it’s a cultivar if it has an extra name attached. The plant with the common name of Wild Bergamot (Monarda fistulosa) has a number of commercially available cultivars, such as the very popular Monarda fistulosa ‘Claire Grace.’? At a lot of the big garden centers, you’ll be more likely to find this cultivar than the straight species.? The cultivar name will be in English as opposed to Latin, must be included in the label, and it comes after the scientific name in single quotes.? Sometimes you’ll also see the term ‘nativar,’ which is simply a cultivar of a native species. There are also intellectual property implications of cultivars.? If I work to develop a cultivar of a certain species and there are good commercial prospects, I can name it something like Echinacea purpurea ‘Tim’s Choice,’ and you wouldn’t be able to propagate that variety without paying me a licensing fee.? It may seem strange to have intellectual property rights over a living thing, but that’s how the system works. The benefit of cultivars is that you know exactly what you’re getting.? They’re…

Thursday Pop-up Sale: Native Plant Availability for 7/20

Lindsay Ifill

We’ll be at the Green Challenge Film Fest screening of Inhabit at the Collingswood Community Center, Thursday, July 20th. Stop by, watch a great film (for free!), and pick up some native plants for the community garden or your garden at home. We’ll be there from 5:30PM – 9PM. All of these plants are native perennials grown here in South Jersey. This batch of Jersey-grown native perennials comes from one of our favorite growers, Clemenson Farms.

Battling Backyard Mosquitoes, Easily and Naturally

Tim Ifill

fight mosquitoes world war 2 poster national archives

We’ve talked a lot on this blog about not just welcoming bugs into our yard and garden, but actively encouraging them.? But there’s still one bug that you’d probably have an easy time convincing this wildlife-friendly organic gardener to nuke from orbit*: the mosquito.? But this summer, I’ve won a battle against this enemy, if not quite the whole war.? And I’ve done it without neurotoxins, hormone disruptors, carcinogens, or any of the other garden-variety poisons that the agrichemical industry pushes on gardeners. Look, I don’t have to go through all the reasons mosquitoes are terrible, and I don’t even live in an area where I have to worry about Zika or malaria.?In the Philly row homes we lived in before moving to Collingswood, our patios were virtually unusable without a beekeeper suit in the height of summer.?But this year, though I can’t say we’re mosquito-free, we can now spend a whole evening sitting in our yard without being tortured by them. Our chief weapon is Bti**, a naturally occurring bacterium that has absolutely no effect on humans, plants, birds, mammals, or the vast majority of insects other than a few pesky members of the order diptera (true flies): fungus gnats, biting black flies, and of course, mosquitoes. Bti (Bacillus thuringiensis israeliensis) is marketed commercially as Mosquito Dunks or Mosquito Bits, and the idea is that if you have a water feature near your home, you can use it to prevent mosquitoes from breeding in it. But you can go beyond that and use these products to actively set a trap for them. We all know that mosquitoes breed in standing water, and standard advice is to get rid of as much of it in your yard as you can.? But you’ll never get it all, and even if you do, your neighbors will inevitably have some.? This is where the Bti comes in.? It doesn’t affect adult mosquitoes, but it kills their larvae upon hatching.? So why not set up some nice inviting standing water, toss some mosquito bits in it and hope that those lady mosquitoes take advantage of what appears to be a very promising breeding ground?? They’ll lay their eggs none-the-wiser, but their offspring will never survive to torment you. In our case, I set up a bucket in an inconspicuous part of our yard, filled it with water and Bti (tip: use the smaller bits…

America, The Beautiful: Show Pride in our Natural Heritage

Lindsay Ifill

It’s the Fourth of July, a chance for all of us to come together in our red, white, and blue and agree that despite all of the divisiveness that’s got us down, we love this country and are proud to call it our home. The spirit of today has got me thinking about our garden, as usual, and dreaming of what it might be like if everyone celebrating with juicy watermelon and good beer and patriotic songs and parades small and big would have that same pride and sense of place when planning their home and community landscapes. Often when we talk about our natural heritage, the conversation centers around how critical it is to protect our national and state parks. But what sense does it make to stop there? If you believe that gorgeous and diverse forests, wetlands, deserts and prairies are part of our identity, why not promote that same message through your own ecological restoration efforts? ?Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children’s children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.? ? Theodore Roosevelt I find it funny?and sometimes sad and often frustrating, depending on my mood?that we hang flags and talk about who and what is un-American, and then we rip up, replace, or pave over our natural areas with little thought about what it means to strip the country of this incredible part of our past. Take a minute to dream about what your piece of land might have looked like before past generations replaced it with composed gardens meant to mimic the places from which they came. Imagine that 40 million miles of hard-working, air purifying, wildlife-supporting natural beauty we paved over with cement. Now that’s not to say that there’s a single specific pristine time to go back to. Native Americans transformed the land for their needs long before the Europeans began dismantling the massive hardwood forests that covered the East Coast and plowing over the prairies of the Midwest. And prior to all that, there was a mile-thick ice sheet just a little ways north of our little town. But the scale of the transformations of the past 100 (heck, even 60) years have left our ecosystems reeling. If that…

Chinese Yam Was Sent Here From the Future to Kill My Plants

Tim Ifill

Listen, and understand! Dioscorea polystachya is out there! It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop… ever, until your plants are dead! Since moving in to our house we’ve dealt with a typical array of weeds and invasives. Plenty of English Ivy. Japanese stiltgrass. Zombie wisteria that keeps coming back no matter what I do. But by far the worst has been Chinese yam, a climbing, strangling vine that is so persistent, I can only assume that a plant in my garden is an ancestor of a key leader of the future plant resistance, so Skynet sent Chinese yam back in time to terminate it. It doesn’t seem to be one of the most common weeds in our area, but the stuff is pretty much everywhere in our yard, thriving in both sun and shade. It closely resembles bindweed, but the leaves are more rounded and heart-shaped (as opposed to the arrowhead-like bindweed). It starts as a little shoot poking out of the ground, and seemingly within a day it’s grown several feet. You could take a moment to admire a shrub in your yard. Then you go inside for a nice cold drink. When you come back out, you’ll find a new tendril has already made its way to the top of the shrub. Vines seem to seek each other out and wrap around one another to form thick ropes. God forbid you go away for a long weekend. When you get home, you’ll find the ropes have braided themselves together to form an impenetrable blanket over an entire flower bed. The sheer amount of biomass of this species that I’ve removed from my yard so far this spring is incredible. And it’s still everywhere. As the name suggests, the plant uses tubers to store energy underground. This makes it hard to control. When pulling a vine, if the tubers don’t come up with it, I’ve got some news for you. It’ll be back. And they wind so tightly around their prey, pulling it off just strips the foliage right down to the stem. But the real trouble starts when the vine matures enough to produce aerial tubers in late summer. They look, appropriately enough, like tiny potatoes. And they’re attached to the stems by the most delicate of linkages. So any attempt…

Mountain Laurelpalooza at Black Run Preserve

Tim Ifill

mountain laurel flower kalmia latifolia bloom

There’s a lot to love about Black Run Preserve, but maybe the best thing in my mind is how close it is to home. Most other Pine Barrens hikes are a 45-minute to an hour drive for us, but we can get to Black Run in under 25 minutes. (When you have a 2-year-old in the car, that extra 20 minutes can seem like an hour.) Visiting Black Run feels almost like you’re being transported.? You’re driving in the worst kind of Jersey suburban sprawl, then all of a sudden, right around Route 73, you cross from the inner to the outer coastal plain, and everything changes. The sandy, acidic soils give rise to a completely distinct plant community. Far from being barren, these woods are teeming with life?though it’s limited to a relatively small number of species that have co-evolved to thrive in these infertile landscapes. We’d never been to Black Run in the spring before, but after seeing the many mountain laurels (Kalmia latifolia) scattered throughout, we made a note to try to get back at the right time to see them in bloom. This past weekend was just about the peak. Warning: If you get bored easily by pictures of flowers, this may not be the post for you. Practicing more naturalistic, ecological landscaping at home makes any walk out into nature more interesting, because inspiration is everywhere. Though we haven’t had much success (any success) growing mountain laurel yet, seeing the way the shrubs mix with ferns and high bush blueberry helps give us a nice reference point when thinking about how to incorporate different types of plants in a (slightly more composed) way that mimics natural plant communities. Again, it’s amazing how different the landscape is from our own for how close it is.? Note the classic Pine Barrens sand. One highlight of our walk was getting to meet this Fowler’s toad.?A family was hiking a few hundred yards ahead of us, and their son very thoughtfully decided to bring the toad he caught back to show Mae.?She was very pleased, but a little nervous about touching it. There were also a lot of what looked like Spicebush Swallowtails (Papilio troilus) and other butterflies flitting about, but none of them stayed still long enough to get a picture. There are only about twenty species of tree that are native to the inhospitable soils of the…

Devil’s Tongue: A Northeast Native for Cactus Lovers

Lindsay Ifill

The succulent trend?is still very much alive in the design and gardening world. Run a quick Etsy search and you’ll?find?62,331 results for “succulent” and another 77,723 results specifically for “cactus,” most of which are not the plants or handmade?containers for them. There are 2,554 pieces of succulent jewelry, and another 1,462?non-jewelry succulent accessories. I totally get it. Succulents and cacti are resilient, strange, and beautiful plants with an exotic quality, especially to us here in the Northeast. They?elicit thoughts of hot deserts and big skies, at least for me. I’m a sucker for these drought-tolerant plants, and have a growing collection of them in our home. This love for succulents and cacti started?before I knew much at all about the importance of ecological gardening, and perused Sunset in awe of the drought-tolerant landscapes of the Southwest. (Yes, I get Sunset magazine, which friends find funny. My grandmother used to subscribe, and so I started too. It’s escapism.) If you’re into succulents but also understand the importance of?gardening outside with plants that contribute to a healthy ecosystem,?I’ve got a few plant recommendations that serve both botanical interests. Devil’s tongue (Opuntia humifusa) This one, by far, is the best match for Northeastern succulent lovers. Also called low prickly pear or smooth prickly pear, this is the only cactus widespread in the Northeast. It’s a low perennial with striking yellow flowers that precede edible fruit, and really the closest thing you’re going to get to that desert vibe here in Jersey. Prickly pear has been used in?traditional Mexican cuisine for thousands of years, and both the pads and fruit can be eaten. If you’re successful enough in growing this awesome?native succulent and get lots of fruit from it, the juice from the fruit?makes great jelly and can also be used in candy. That’s not all:According to WebMD (yep, that’s right), prickly pear cacti, which are rich in pectin and fiber, are?used to treat?type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, obesity, hangovers, colitis, diarrhea, and benign prostatic hypertrophy (BPH), as well as to fight viral infections. Not surprisingly, native bees and honey bees also love it. The yellow blooms are easy to find, and as Dave Taft points out in this New York Times article, the stamens within the?bowl-shaped flowers actually lean in toward the bee. “Finding an open flower, a bee dives in, swimming through masses of pollen-laden anthers and vibrating its body rapidly to…

Newer

Older