Native plants blooming in my garden today

Lonicera sempervirens, Trumpet Honeysuckle, blooming in my urban backyard native plant garden and wildlife habitat this afternoon.

My little urban backyard native plant garden is in its peak Spring bloom:

• Amsonia tabernaemontana, eastern bluestar
• Aquilegia canadensis, eastern red columbine
• Arisaema triphyllum, Jack-in-the-pulpit
• Asarum canadense, wild ginger
• Chrysogonum virginianum, green-and-gold 
• Cornus stolonifera 'Cardinal'
• Dicentra eximia, fringed bleeding heart
• Fragaria virginiana, Virginia strawberry 
• Geranium maculatum, spotted geranium (just starting)
• Iris cristata, dwarf crested iris
• Lonicera sempervirens, trumpet honeysuckle
• Phlox stolonifera, creeping phlox
• Photinia pyrifolia (Aronia), red shokeberry (just finishing)
• Podophyllum peltatum, mayapple
• Polygonatum biflorum, Solomon's seal
• Sedum ternatum, woodland stonecrop
• Tiarella cordifolia, foamflower
• Trillium (various)
• Vaccinium angustifolium, lowbush blueberry
• Vaccinium corymbosum, highbush blueberry
• Viola sororia, dooryard violet, common blue violet
• Viola striata, striped cream violet
• Zizea aurea, golden alexander

Phlox stolonifera, Creeping Phlox. These appear blue on-screen, not at all like the purple they carry in the garden.


Fragaria virginiana, Virginia Strawberry


Zizia aurea, Golden Alexander


Aquilegia canadensis, Eastern Red Columbine


Vaccinium corymbosum, Highbush Blueberry


Chrysogonum virginianum, Green-and-Gold


Amsonia tabernaemontana, Eastern Bluestar

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My Native Plant Garden

Rest for Winter's Dead

2019-04-07: Additions and link corrections

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Amelanchier Flower Buds


With a score or so species, subspecies, and natural hybrids native to northeastern North America, the genus Amelanchier goes by several common names, many of which represent the plants' phenology:

Shadblow

It blooms - blows - when the shad are running.

Juneberry

The edible, dark-purple fruit ripen in June.

Serviceberry

It blooms now, when the ground has thawed enough to dig new graves, and services can be held for those who died during the Winter.

Alosa sapidissima, American Shad, print by Shermon Foote Denton, First Annual Report of the Commissioners of Fisheries, Game, and Forests of the State of New York (1896)

County-level map of Amelanchier distribution, Biota of North America Program (BONAP)

There are examples of Amelanchier blooming all around us, if you know what to look for. Unfortunately, you're more likely to encounter Pyrus calleryana, Callery Pear, alien and invasive, and widely planted as street trees. This year, they started blooming before the Serviceberries.

Serviceberries, to my eye, are more elegant, with widely-spaced branches, and feathery flowers held in elongated clusters. My specimen, Amelanchier x grandiflora 'Autumn Brilliance', finally bloomed two days ago. It's opening unevenly, still a day or two away from full bloom. Perhaps it's as suspicious of our early Spring as I am, hoarding its treasures lest they all be squandered at once to a hard frost.

Slideshow

Related Content

Native Plant Profile: Amelanchier x grandiflora

Links

USDA PLANTS Database: AMELA
Wikipedia: Amelanchier
BONAP: Amelanchier

Emergence

Our unseasonably warm weather has turned the phenology dial up to 11 in my urban backyard native plant / wildlife habitat garden.

Last Wednesday, the furry buds of Amelanchier x grandiflora 'Autumn Brilliance' were extending.


Yesterday, four days later, the shoots have turned upright, and individual flower buds are visible. Bloom is imminent.


Helenium autumnale, Sneezeweed, NYC-local Ecotype. This plant already needs dividing, something I wasn't expecting to do for another month.


Podophyllum peltatum, Mayapple


Trillium (cuneatum?)


Mertensia virginica, Virgina Bluebells, is already tall and full of sky-blue flower buds.


Flower Buds, Vaccinium corymbosum, Highbush Blueberry, NYC-local ecotype. This also seems extremely early. Maybe I'll get blueberries in May this year.


Allium tricoccum, Ramps

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BBG 2012 Calendar: Your Take

Updated 2011-11-20
My photo of Patrick Dougherty's "Natural History" blanketed in January's snow opens Brooklyn Botanic Garden's 2012 calendar.


Earlier this year, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden solicited submissions for a visitor-sourced calendar:

Among the Garden’s most passionate visitors are photographers, who capture the beauty each season brings to the Garden’s 52 acres. Their images, taken from unique vantage points, offer perspectives that are at once stunning and unexpected. The 2012 calendar celebrates BBG through their eyes, with a selection of the best visitor-contributed photos from an online competition hosted last year.

Today, the winners met for a reception and guided tour of the Garden.


After coffee and munchies, following a brief welcome and introduction from BBG's Claire Hansen, we set out on our own guided tour of the "Your Take" trail, a temporary exhibit on the grounds of the Garden, highlighting each of the photos in the calendar, and its photographer, at the location the photo was taken. Here I am posing with my sign.

Photo: John Magisano

The signs will be up through January. Here's the complete list of all photos in the calendar.

• January: Chris Kreussling, Patrick Dougherty's "Natural History"
• February: David Finkelstein, Desert House
• March: Margaret Halligan, Beech Grove
• April: Maria Buck, Cherry Esplanade from the Cranford Overlook
• May: Marie Viljoen, Bluebell Wood
• June: Maxim Pierre, Cranford Rose Garden
• July: Vivek Bharathan, Lily Pool Terrace
• August: Marc Dalio, Podophyllum peltatum in the Native Flora Garden
• September: Tara Schmitt, Herb Garden
• October: Jackie Weisberg, the Japanese Garden
• November: Paul Grebanier, Ginkgo stream bank
• December: Leah Hansen, Bonsai Museum

Slideshow

Related Content

Flickr photo set

Links

BBG's Flickr set of copies of the photos used in the calendar
BBG 2012 Calendar, 66 Square Feet (Marie Viljoen)

Fall in Miniature: BBG's Bonsai in November

A yose (group-style) bonsai specimen of Acer palmatum, Japanese Maple, developed by Stanley Chinn currently on display at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Yose typically group multiple specimens of the same, or closely related species, in the same planting to simplify cultural requirements. Chinn's masterful touch is the selection of cultivars with different fall foliage colors. This specimen is unusual in that there appear to be only two, rather than the typical three or some other odd number, of the trees in the grouping.


There is no better time of year to visit the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's C. V. Starr Bonsai Museum than right now. Most of the trees on display are in peak fall foliage color. And while the wind has knocked the leaves off many of the trees on the grounds, the sheltered bonsai have been spared those indignities.

This season, they've placed an additional display table at the northern end of the greenhouse, opposite the entrance.

Slideshow

What's a tree worth?

You can quantify the relative benefits of an individual tree, and project its future benefits as it grows through the years, with i-Tree Design:

i-Tree Design (beta) allows anyone to make a simple estimation of the benefits individual trees provide. With inputs of location, species, tree size and condition, users will get an understanding of the benefits that trees provide related to greenhouse gas mitigation, air quality improvements and storm water interception. With the added step of drawing a house or building footprint—and virtually "planting" a tree—trees' effects on building energy use can be evaluated.

This tool is intended to be a simple and accessible starting point for understanding individual trees' value to the homeowner and their community.

Using it is straightforward:

1. Enter a street address.
2. Select the common name of the tree species or genus.
3. Enter the size, indicated by DBH: diameter at breast height (5' off the ground).
4. Select the general health or condition of the tree, from "Excellent" to "Dead or Dying."

The results are returned quickly. Details are available from the different tabs.

The application requires Flash to be supported and enabled in your browser, so it won't work behind many corporate firewalls.

[goo.gl]

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Urban Forestry

Links

i-Tree Design benefit Calculator

Gardening with the Hymenoptera (and yet not)

Contents

• Bees
• Wasps
• Mimics
• Photographing Insect Activity
• Related Content
• Recommended Reading
• Links

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One of the great pleasures of gardening is observing the activity the garden invites. I can lay out the welcome mat, and set the table, but the guests decide whether or not the invitation is enticing enough to stop by for a drink, a meal, or to raise a family. While charismatic megafauna such as birds and mammals are entertaining, the most common and endlessly diverse visitors are insects.

The Hymenoptera includes bees, wasps, and ants. Although my garden also provides amply for ants, we'll stick with the bees and wasps today. Following are some of the few portaits I've been able to capture of the many visitors to my gardens. The pollinator magnet, Pycnanthemum, Mountain-mint, in the Lamiaceae, provides the stage for many of these photos. I'm always amazed at the variety and abundance of insect activity it attracts when blooming.

Multiple pollinators on Pycnanthemum

Bees

There are over 250 species of bees native to New York City alone. I'm still learning to identify just a handful of the dozens of species that frequent my garden.

My current favorite is the bejeweled Agapostemon, Jade Bee

Solstice: Summer Abundant

Illumination of Earth by Sun at the northern solstice.

This season's Solstice (Summer in the Northern hemisphere, Winter in the Southern), occurs at 17:16/5:16pm UTC on June 21, 2011. That's 13:16/1:16pm where I am, in the Eastern Time zone, under Daylight Savings Time (UTC-4).

The name is derived from the Latin sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still), because at the solstices, the Sun stands still in declination; that is, its apparent movement north or south comes to a standstill.
- Solstice, Wikipedia

As the sun stands still, everything else seems to be in motion. Summer is in sway. The succession of insect emergences quickens its pace even as it near its end. Blooms seem to explode, with something new opening each day. Even so, the day after tomorrow will be shorter, the day after shorter still. The arc of gravity's rainbow is masked by this abundance. So we celebrate it, as we should.

Some shots from past solstices in my gardens.

Garden #2 in Park Slope, 2001

Gardening with the Lepidoptera

Tomorrow, Sunday, June 12, my garden will be opened for its second tour of the season: the Victorian Flatbush House (and Garden!) Tour, to benefit the Flatbush Development Corporation (FDC). Earlier this week, I wrote about the transformation of the garden over the six past years, since we bought our home. Today, I'm providing details about one part of that transformation, one which is easy to replicate on a small scale, even in a tree bed or on a balcony.

After readying my backyard native plant garden for its debut tour for NYC Wildflower Week in May, I decided to complete the requirements to register my garden as a Certified Wildlife Habitat (#141,173) with the National Wildlife Federation. With over 80 species of native plants, I easily met three of the four requirements: shelter, food, and places to raise young. All I lacked was water, a requirement satisfied by placing some birdbaths and a terra-cotta cistern.

On Friday, May 27, I mounted the plaque on the entrance arbor.


The morning after I put out this welcome mat, I saw butterflies visiting a vine in the garden. I was puzzled, since the plant wasn't blooming yet. Closer observation revealed that they were laying eggs on the vine.

The Years Have Been Kind

This Spring has been a season of garden anniversaries for me. Six years ago, my partner and I bought our home in Flatbush. In the first month after closing, I began weeding, composting, and envisioning the gardens. Five years ago, I started this blog to document what I was doing and record my explorations.

It's also been a season to celebrate the gardens. Last month, for New York City Wildflower Week (NYCWW), I opened my native plant garden for a garden tour for the first time. This Sunday, June 12, the gardens will be opened again, this time for the Victorian Flatbush House Tour, to benefit the Flatbush Development Corporation (FDC). And in May, I registered my garden as a Certified Wildlife Habitat (#141,173) with the National Wildlife Federation.

My original vision for the backyard native plant garden is largely realized. I'm close to completing development of the planting beds. The shrubs and perennials have grown and spread; there is little bare ground. Unlike me, the garden looks better than it did six years ago. Take a look, and let me know what you think.

Slideshow

By view of the garden