Spotlighting a Successful Suburban Native Plant Installation
By Caroline Scalzo, CGC Horticulturist
Within my first few minutes of meeting up with the green boss, Brandon Reynolds, to view his at-home pollinator garden, friendly neighbors on their evening walk stopped to admire the blooms and even ask a few questions. Brandon happily explained his process and timeline for creating such a lovely pollinator habitat right in his own yard. Over beekeeping cocktails and anise hyssop goat cheese snacks, a lovely conversation about plants marked the start of a very exciting and enthused friendship.
Brandon’s white picket fence is a perfect example of how the formality of gardening and native plants can coincide. Flushes of blanket flower, echinacea and asters explode from the soil in a colorful display.
When he first purchased the property, Brandon explained, there was a honeysuckle hedge in front of the fence blocking the views from his front porch, and he was determined to remove it. After a hard day’s work removing the honeysuckle, Brandon sourced plants from the CGC’s first-ever Fall Native Plant Sale. In just over a year’s time, they have matured and flourished into a colorful blanket of plants and pollinators alike!
Brandon’s garden hosts both the habitat and food sources for a plethora of wildlife to survive. Some of my favorite moments from his garden include this lovely Coreopsis lanceolata lace leafed coreopsis paired with the clumping Allium millennium in front of a backdrop of milkweeds. Brandon sends me videos regularly of the wonderful pollinator action occurring on these plants, from monarch magic sucking away nectar on some of his Liatris to them laying eggs on the milkweeds. His Lobelia cardinalis opening in front of the lovely Pycnanthenmum tenuifolium is probably driving all the hummingbirds crazy for a chance to collect nectar.
Brandon invited me to this garden not only to document the incredible progress of these plants but to also ask some questions about what to do next. He noticed half of the garden space came in really well and the other half struggled to get established. Based on the site’s history, it seemed like a problem with aeration in the soil. The area that did really well was where a honeysuckle with very large roots was ripped out and replanted, while the other side was less successful.
My general recommendation to do yearly is to broad fork. This promotes better water drainage and air to the roots of plants. For those who don’t know what a broad fork is, it’s a large pitchfork-esque tool that’s used to low-till and aerate soil. If you don’t have a large broad fork, you can just use a single steel tine and drive that into the soil every square foot. For Brandon’s yard, I grabbed a pitchfork and started driving in holes.
After some much-needed rain this season and some mulching, I’m excited to go back to this garden and see the fall display. Brandon really chose a diverse palette of plants to keep blooms going all season long. From the early-season alliums and heuchera, to the absolutely stunning midseason bloom of the native honeysuckle that crawls along the picket fence and attracts all of the hummingbirds, to late season asters and solidagos, Brandon’s yard is definitely a place to see what all the buzz is about.
A list of plants I found in his yard:
Aquilegia canadensis
Asters
Echinacea purpurea
Heuchera parvifolia
Liatris spicata
Lobelia cardinalis
Lonicera semperverins
Monarda fistulosa
Rudbeckia hirta
Rudbeckia laciniata
Zizia aurea