Bayscape Blog 5/12/11

Beautiful Baptisia

by Judy DeFiglio

If you are looking for a spectacular plant for your spring garden consider the Baptisia australis (Blue False Indigo). Big, bold, blue and beautiful, this plant has it all. The intense violet-blue pealike flowers on four foot tall stems really command attention. The leaves are an interesting blue-green color with an oblong shape. The flowers are long lasting and followed by two inch long black seed pods that add an additional season of interest to your landscape. The plant emerges in spring with flower stalks that look almost like asparagus, then grows several feet to bloom in mid May.

Baptisia prefer full sun but can grow in part shade. They have a deep taproot and do not like to be divided or moved, so plant them where you want them to grow. I recommend you plant them in the back of the border or center of an island bed. Though this is a perennial, it is shrub-like in appearance and gets three to four feet wide, so give it room to grow. Even after the flowers fade this is a plant that will look good in your garden. It may be large but it is not sprawling and retains a nice vase-like shape.

This native plant grows well in our sandy soil, but enjoys a bit of compost mixed in, especially if you are growing it at the beach. It even has a good degree of salt tolerance. Since it is in the legume family it has nitrogen-fixing ability so no fertizer is needed, great news for our environment.

While the blue is my favorite, there are also white and yellow flowered varieties of Baptisia. All of them put on an impressive display.

I am very excited about all the enthusiastic gardeners I am meeting as I continue to spread the word on using native plants to beautify their landscape and help the environment. I will be posting updates on workshops and lectures and hope to meet lots more of you in the future. Become a member of the Littoral Society and receive emails of upcoming events at http://www.littoralsociety.org/

Bayscape Blog 5/6/11

Spring Beauties

By Judy DeFiglio

What a gorgeous spring we are having this year! I can’t remember when we have had such a beautiful display of spring flowering trees and shrubs. I have so many blooms on my dogwoods, redbuds and fothergilla it is amazing. The chokeberries are opening and the viburnums are ready to burst. I am so happy I switched to all these native plants a few years ago, the rewards are endless, and the only work I had to do this spring was rake some leaves, which I used in my compost pile, and renew some mulch in my garden beds.

You can send me all the glossy catalogs you want advertising the top 10 new plants for 2011, I admit they are pretty to look at, but, what really makes my heart skip a beat is stepping outside and seeing the beautiful, uniquely shaped blossoms on my old fashioned bleeding hearts ( Dicentra eximia). This native perennial has arching stalks of pink, heart- shaped flowers, grows 18 inches tall and is a spring bloomer that puts on quite a show. It can take some morning sun but prefers some shade in the afternoon. The foliage is fern like and greenish-blue. Another native Dicentra, dutchmen’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) is an all white variety with interesting pants-shaped flowers in early spring. It is smaller, only growing to 6 inches tall and prefers a moist, shady spot.

My mountain pinks (Phlox subulata) are another native perennial that looks especially spectacular this year. The carpet of pink flowers is so thick you can hardly see the green leaves. This plant likes well drained, sandy soil and full sun. It looks so pretty spreading through my rock garden. It’s been blooming for several weeks already and even after to flowers fade, the fine, narrow leaved foliage will continue to look great throughout the summer.

If you weren’t able to attend the Littoral Society’s Native Plant Workshop at Hammett’s Garden Center last weekend you really missed a great day. Beautiful weather, wonderful native plants, interesting info on how to go native and an enthusiastic group of people interested in environmentally friendly gardening. Who could ask for more! Helen Henderson, Policy Advocate for the Littoral Society explained, “Hammett’s Garden Center is our first retail nursery to commit to providing a specific area dedicated to native plants for our Bayscape for Barnegat Bay program. This is the American Littoral Society’s grass roots Shore Stewardship program that encourages residents of the Barnegat Bay watershed to adopt more bay-friendly landscaping and grounds maintenance practices including using low-maintenance native species instead of non-natives that require excessive water, fertilizer, and pesticides that ultimately run off the land into the bay. The program’s mantra is, Don’t landscape- Bayscape.” To learn more about the Bayscape for Barnegat Bay program, visit www.littoralsociety.org/bayscape_for_barnegat_ bay.aspx. Hammett’s will be stocking the native plants suggested in this blog with new shipments arriving each week.

Time to go outside and enjoy the show!