Native Plant Database for Chesapeake Region Now Online

Last week the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, and Image Matters LLC unveiled their new online Native Plant Center. The new site provides a very user-friendly way to identify and/or select native plant species for the Bay watershed.

The online portal includes a fully-searchable database and online access to their incredibly popular booklet titled Native Plants for Wildlife Habitat and Conservation Landscaping: Chesapeake Bay Watershed.

That small booklet with the long title is often simply called that "orange booklet magazine thing that has all those native plants in it." Being able to access the publication online anytime will be a real boon for those of us who find ourselves in field, garden or hardware store asking questions about the plants in front of us. (My own hard copy of the booklet is quite dog-eared and coffee stained at this point, and has traveled the state in the passenger seat of my car as I went plant shopping.)

"Since its release in 2003, the demand for the resource has never waned," said Leopoldo Miranda Supervisor of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Chesapeake Bay Field Office, referring to the booklet in a recent Alliance press release.

He's not kidding. I once was at a native plant meeting where someone opened a box of them to give away for free and the audience members descended like hungry hungry birds to grab their copies. Having it freely available online is really great.

Guest post on the Metro DC Lawn and Garden Blog

I was thrilled to get an invitation from Betsy Franz and the Metro DC Lawn and Garden Blog this month.

Betsy's blog is one of the best in the area for gardeners-- full of great info every time. I also really warmed to the idea of writing about native plants here at the end of winter.

Thanks, Betsy, for the invitation to be a part of your great online space!

(The picture above, by the way, is of the swamp sunflowers mentioned in the article. Although in my piece I talk about them as brown and dead at the end of winter here is what they look like in autumn in full bloom.)

All that Beautiful Poison Ivy?

Is is possible for something be to really annoying and beautiful at the same time?

There's no mistaking the annoyance factor of poison ivy. One brush with this vigorous native plant and you'll itch and itch.

But at the same time, it is one of the first plants to become really fantastically beautiful in the early fall. Sometimes one vine will stretch up and out for twenty five feet more, ablaze in shades of orange, yellow and scarlet red over the still-green trees.

Surely the birds might find it beautiful, since many find this vine's berries so nutrionally valuable. They don't itch from exposure, they just get a feast. Maybe the color even helps them locate those poison ivy feasts quickly during their long, hard migrations south.

Maybe. Just a hypothesis.

But seeing as how I'm not a bird, I'll enjoy my hypothesizing and poison ivy leaf-peeping from a distance, thanks.

The Doldrums of July and Witchy Fingered Plants

Every year about this same time, I become completely annoyed by my garden.

All of the flowers of early summer, which looked so lovely a couple of weeks back, have now lost color and are starting to set seed. The late summer bloomers aren’t started quite yet. Meanwhile, the heat starts cooking here in DC and the cool season lawns all go dormant and turn brown.

This is the doldrums of native plant summer for me. Things that are tall and not blooming just looking like gigantic weeds. Things that are short look a bit forlorn with out blooms.

These frustrations were heavy on my mind when my friend M. from Peru came by to chat this afternoon. Tall, she said. Very, very tall. We stared at the particular plant in question, my Night Blooming primroses. They are tall -- but not by any stretch stately. And now, as we are about to embark upon July, they really do look like weeds.

Each night at dusk they become beautiful, as their fruit scented flowers unfurl like fairy umbrellas being popped open. In the early morning, the flowers linger a while and the bumble bees are insane and drunk out there, drinking up the yellow nectar.

In the first week of June those plants are still short and blend in with the rest of the plants during the day. But here in the midday heat of July they look like used tissues, limp and shriveled and awful. The tall, branching plants are covered in seed heads which remind me of witch fingers.

Within a week, I’ll cut them down and reclaim the garden. One or two I’ll leave; because the plant is biennial it will need to seed itself in for next year. But for now, we suffer through the witchy-fingered stage and wait for a refreshing rain storm.

What is this, M. asks delicately, going around the corner to the spot where the blueberries are still producing lovely purple orbs. She is delighted to see our vegetable garden, too, below the primroses, where squash and tomatoes are taking off in glorious, gluttonous abundance and our herbs are happier than ever. I cut basil, oregano, thyme for her.

She asks me how to say the name for chamomile in English, and wonders if it is the plant that helps you nap. We talk about making tea. The heat simmers with cicada sound all around us.

Iced tea is good too, I insist with a laugh. Let’s put in some mint.

Suddenly, above us, there’s a twittering of birds in the witchy fingers. A male and female goldfinch have arrived, pretty as could be. They land and eat seeds from the primroses before flying quickly off to another part of the garden. And I am left with M. to think of all the different meanings of the word “bewitched.”