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Wild-Flower Garden
WILD-FLOWER GARDENA wild-flower garden can enhance your property with added beauty. You can plan a pleasant search in the woods, collecting material, and then the fun in determining what will reside in your wild-flower garden.
Many people say they've had no luck in the least with such a garden. Luck has little to do with it, but an understanding that wild flowers are like people and each has its own individual personality. What a plant has been accustomed to in Nature it desires always. In fact, when removed from its own habitat and familiar living conditions, it sickens and dies. That is enough to tell us that we should copy Nature herself. Suppose you are hunting wild flowers. As you choose certain flowers from the woods, notice the soil they are in, the place, conditions, the surroundings, and the neighbours.
Suppose you find dog-tooth violets and wind-flowers growing near together. Then place them the same way in your own wild-flower garden. Suppose you find a certain violet enjoying an open situation; then it should always have the same. You get the point, don't you? If you wish wild flowers to grow in a home garden make them feel like they are still in the wild. Deceive them into almost believing that they are still in their native haunts.
Wild flowers should be transplanted after blossoming time is over. Take a trowel and a handbasket into the woods with you. As you scoop up a few, a columbine, or a hepatica, be sure to take with the roots a healthy supply of the plant's own soil, which must be packed about it when replanted.
The bed into which these plants are to go should be prepared carefully before this trip of yours. Surely you do not wish to bring those plants back to wait over a day or night before planting. They ought to go into their new living quarters at once. The bed needs soil from the woods, deep and rich and full of leaf mold. The under drainage system should be excellent. Plants are not to go into water-logged ground to prevent root rot. Some people think that all wood plants should have a soil saturated with water. But the woods themselves are not water-logged, except in wetlands. It may be that you will need to dig your garden up very deeply and put some stone in the bottom. Add a layer of sand about 2 inches or 50 mm thick. Over this the top soil should go. And on top, where the top soil once was, put a new layer of the rich soil you brought from the woods.
Before planting water the soil well. Then as you make places for the plants put into each hole some of the soil which belongs to the plant which is to be put there.
I think it would be a rather nice plan to have a wild-flower garden giving a succession of bloom from early spring to late fall; so let us start off with March, the hepatica, spring beauty and saxifrage. Then comes April bearing in its arms the beautiful columbine, the tiny bluets and wild geranium. For May there are the dog-tooth violet and the wood anemone, false Solomon's seal, Jack-in-the-pulpit, wake robin, bloodroot and violets. June will give the bellflower, mullein, bee balm and foxglove. I would choose the gay butterfly weed for July. Let turtle head, aster, Joe Pye weed, and Queen Anne's lace make the rest of the season brilliant until first frost.
Let's talk about about the likes and dislikes of these plants. After you get started you'll keep on adding to this wild-flower list.
Everyone loves the hepatica. Before spring time has really decided to come, this little flower pokes its head up and shows just how tough it is. Tucked under a covering of dry leaves the blossoms wait for a ray of warm sunshine to bring them out. These embryo flowers are further protected by a fuzzy covering. This reminds one of a similar protective covering which new fern leaves have. In the spring a hepatica plant wastes no time on getting a new wardrobe of leaves. It makes its old ones do until the blossom has had its day. Then the dormant new leaves have a chance. These delayed leaves, are ready to help out next season. You will find hepaticas growing in clusters, kind of family groups. They are likely to be found in quite open places in the woods. The soil is found to be rich and loose. So these should go only in partially shaded places and under good soil conditions. If planted with other woods specimens give them the benefit of a preferably exposed position, that they may catch the early spring sunshine. I should cover hepaticas over with a light bedding material of leaves in the fall. During the last days of February, unless the weather is extremely cold, take this leaf covering away. You'll find the hepatica blossoms all ready to poke up through the soil.
This spring beauty scarcely allows the hepatica to pull ahead of her. With a white blossom which has dainty tracings of pink, a thin, wiry stem, and narrow, grass-like leaves, this spring flower cannot be mistaken. You will find these spring beauties growing in big clusters in rather open places. Plant a number of the roots and allow the sun a chance to get at them. For this plant loves the sun.
The other March flower mentioned is the saxifrage. This belongs in quite a different sort of environment. It is a plant which grows in dry and rocky places. Often one will find it in cracks of rocks. There is an old tale to the effect that the saxifrage roots twine about rocks and work their way into them so that the rock itself splits. Anyway, it is a rock garden plant. I have found it in dry, sandy places right on the edges of a big rock. It has white flower clusters extended from hairy stems.
The columbine is another flora that is rather likely to be found in rocky places. Standing below a ledge and looking up, one sees nestled here and there in rocky crevices one or more of columbine plants. The nodding red heads bob on wiry, slender stems. The roots don't push deeply into the soil; in fact, often the soil barely gets over them. Now, just because the columbine has little soil, it does not signify that it is indifferent to the soil conditions. For it always has lived, and always should live, under good drainage conditions. I wonder if it has struck you, how really hygienic plants are? Plenty of fresh air, proper drainage, sunlight, and good food are fundamentals with most all plants.
It is apparent from study of these plants how easy it is to discover what plants like. After studying their likes and dislikes, then do not make the mistake of cramming them all together under inadequate drainage conditions.
I always have a feeling of personal fondness for the bluets. When they come I always feel that now things are beginning to calm down outdoors. They start with rich, lovely, little delicate blue blossoms. As June gets hotter and hotter their color fades a bit, until occasionally they look quite haggard and white. Some people call them Quaker ladies, others innocence. Under any name they are enchanting. They grow in clusters, sometimes in sunshiny fields, sometimes by the road-side. From this we learn that they are more finicky about the open sunlight than about the soil.
If you desire a flower to pick and use for bouquets, then the wild geranium is not your flower. It wilts very quickly after picking and almost instantly casts off its petals. But the purplish flowers are showy, and the leaves, while kind of coarse, are deeply cut. This latter effect gives a sure boldness to the plant that's considered attractive. The plant is found in mostly moist, partially shaded portions of the woods. I like this plant in the garden. It adds good color and permanent color as long as blossoming time holds out, since there is no problem in picking it.
There are more varieties of wild flowers I might have suggested. These I have mentioned weren't given for the purpose of a flower guide, but with only one end in mind; your understanding of how to study soil conditions for the study of starting a wild-flower garden.
If you fear outcomes, take only one or two flowers and examine just what you select. Having mastered, or more beneficial, become familiar with a few, add more some other year to your garden. I think you will love your wild garden best before you are done with it. It is a genuine study, as you'll see.
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