The meadow is really just a field that we mow once a year – whatever grows there is sown by Mother Nature and it changes from year to year. There’s a good display of black-eyed susans this year (Rudbeckia sp.). Lots of fleabane (Erigeron spp.) and yarrow (Achillea) too.

Black-eyed Susans and Fleabane

We have our share of buzzy pollinators in the meadow, but I’m more attracted to the big colorful insects that float over the flowers and grasses – the dragonflies and butterflies.

Calico Pennant

Black Swallowtail

An incomplete list of some of the native flowers blooming in the meadow today:

• Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia sp.)
• Fleabane (Erigeron spp.). We have at least 2 species of Fleabane, and I haven’t positively identified them.
• Yarrow (Achillea millefolium)
• Maryland Meadow Beauty (Rhexia mariana)
• Mountain Mint (Pycnanthemum sp.)

Thanks to Gail at Clay & Limestone for championing native wildflowers!

Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia)

The Mountain Laurel is once again in bloom. Last year it had very few flowers and I was afraid it might not come back.  Not to worry, that plant has been there a long time. It was a large leggy shrub in the woods next to the driveway when we bought the property and it’s still a large leggy shrub. Those flowers, like our native azaleas, are way above my head. I timidly snipped a few branches back to try to thicken it up, but it really needs more drastic pruning and I just can’t make myself do it.

I’ve written about this plant and its smaller sibling before in detail (exactly three years ago), so I won’t repeat myself. That post has more and better photos and includes a tidbit about the unusual flower structure in relation to bees. But I didn’t mention anything about the history of Kalmia. The genus Kalmia was named by Carolus Linneaus himself, for his student Pehr (Peter) Kalm, who botanized his way through eastern North America in the mid-1700s, collecting plant samples to send back to Sweden. You can read Kalm’s own account of Mountain Laurel, or “spoon tree” as he called it, at the American Journeys website. I don’t see a way to link directly to the page, but Kalm describes it beginning on page 262.

A few other notable and native wildflowers in bloom on this Wildflower Wednesday are Venus’s Looking Glass (Triodanis perfoliata), Whorled Loosestrife (Lysimachia quadrifolia), Cut-leaf Evening Primrose (Oenothera lacinata) and Blue-eyed Grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium).

It’s the 15th of the month again and time for garden bloggers to show off what’s blooming in their gardens via Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day, a internet event created and hosted by Carol at May Dreams Gardens.

Here at Tangled Branches South, we have dianthuses. Lots of dianthuses.

Dianthus 'Rainbow Loveliness'

I’ve been plugging Dianthus ‘Rainbow Loveliness’ for about as long as I’ve been growing it (since 2007). The fringy feathery flowers are spectacular grouped together, as you can see above, and also rewardingly complex up close.

Dianthus 'Rainbow Loveliness'

I wrote a longish post about ‘Rainbow Loveliness’ last year, so I won’t repeat myself. But in that post, I mentioned that one of the parents of ‘Rainbow Loveliness’ is a class of dianthus known as Allwood Pinks. When I saw a blend of Allwood Pinks called ‘Fragrant Village Pinks’ in the Chiltern Seeds catalog I had to buy some. I sowed the seed last spring and transplanted several of the plants to the kitchen garden. A few bloomed late last year, and greatly resembled ‘Rainbow Loveliness’. Hmm, didn’t expect that. Now most of the rest of them are in bloom. While I’d agree that they’re fragrant, I’m not so sure about any of them being Allwood Pinks. I have a range of colors, flower forms, and plant habits. Some of them are very nice.

Dianthus x allwoodii 'Fragrant Village Pinks'? These particular flowers have a wonderful spicy vanilla-y scent that reminds me of D. gratianopolitanus 'Bath's Pink'.

Some of the flowers are what I would call “curiosities”.

Dianthus x allwoodii 'Fragrant Village Pinks' ?

And a couple of the flowers even look like the photo on Chiltern’s website.

Dianthus x allwoodii 'Fragrant Village Pinks'

So I don’t know exactly what I’ve grown, but I like them all, even the curiosities.

Cottage-y flowers are a favorite of mine, so I couldn’t resist the catalog description of the single-flowered Sweet Williams:

No old English cottage garden could possibly be complete without its share of Sweet Williams, beautiful in the border and perhaps one of the most attractive cut flowers. Easy to grow; once established and left to themselves, they will take over your garden! We also offer lovely single-flowered Sweet Williams in separate colours.

The original, the quintessential, Sweet William, if you have the others, your garden must still have some of these.

Dianthus barbatus, Single-flowered Mix

I wouldn’t mind if they did take over my garden. They’re beautiful, they’re fragrant and each flower cluster sits atop a marvelously long straight stem, perfect for cutting. If you’ve only seen the hybrid Sweet Williams that garden centers sell in packs, these are a very different thing. They’re about 18 -24 inches tall (those the deer chewed off over the winter are shorter) and have a very full mounded habit.

Dianthus barbatus, Single-flowered Mix

That’s it for the dianthuses. I’m having so much fun with them; you may see more species and varieties here next year.

Another flower I’d like to point out is on a plant not usually grown for flowers. This is a culinary sage, Salvia officinalis ‘Extrakta’.

Sage 'Extrakta'

I’ve grown the plain species before, but I think the flowers on ‘Extrakta’ are nicer – more of them and a brighter blue than the plain species. And a side benefit – the Sweet Williams that were snuggled up next to the sage were not eaten by deer.

So, what else is in bloom? Here’s the list.

• Provencal Thyme
• Lemon Mist Thyme
• Chives
• Rosemary ‘Herb Cottage’
• Violas sown from seed saved from ‘Historic Florist Mix’
• Viola ‘Nature Mulberry Shades’ and ‘Nature Yellow and Red’
• Cuphea llavea (Bat-faced cuphea)
• Lonicera sempervirens (Coral Honeysuckle)
• Salvia x sylvestris ‘May Night’
• Salvia lyrata
• Galium verum
• Vegetables: Peas and Tomatoes!

Blueberries & Associates

Parts of the woods at Tangled Branches South are carpeted with blueberries (Vaccinium sp.). Or they may be huckleberries (Gaylussacia sp.). I haven’t made a serious attempt to identify which species because everywhere I read that identification is difficult and natural hybrids are common. Further, huckleberries, which are now in the genus Gaylussacia were once in the genus Vaccinium. And one of the Vacciniums I think I may have identified here goes by the common names of Black Highbush Blueberry and Downy Swamp-Huckleberry. There are at least 3 species of Vaccinium/Gaylussacia in the photo above.

But there’s one Vaccinium which is fairly easy to identify and is blooming now.

Vaccinium stamineum (Deerberry)

Deerberry – Vaccinium stamineum – has relatively large, attractive, abundant, white bell-shaped flowers.

Deerberry flowers

The berries are supposedly edible, but I haven’t tried them – one reason being that I’ve never seem them. I wonder if the critters eat them before they’re ripe? I’ve seen bluebirds feasting on green blueberries, long before I would think they taste good.

Some of my favorite wildflower books are really ecology books. John Eastman’s The Book of… series not only describes the plants, but tells you their roles in the great web of life. This is from The Book of Forest and Thicket:

Blueberry plants host so many insects that only some of them can be mentioned. The chief pollinators are bees. Inside the flower, bees often vibrate their wings vigorously, shaking loose the pollen. Look for flowers punctured at the base, where bees occasionally bypass their pollination task by biting through the flower wall to “rob” the nectaries. Watch too for bees landing on discolored leaves and licking them; this behavior transmits Monilinia, a fungous disease of the fruits.

Because so many members of the blueberry clan live around here, I’ve not tried to grow them in the garden. But Sara Stein had high praise for them as garden plants in her book Noah’s Garden:

Blueberries are happy in full sun, relaxed in dappled shade, uncomplaining of drought, but just as pleased to grow in damp. No blueberry pal of mine has ever asked for pruning, wanted my protection from pests or weather, or even expressed the slightest appetite for food. They are companions whose kin are also welcome: their lowbush cousins, their huckleberry relatives, their dwarfs and creeping species. And this tribe has what has become for me the authenticity I seek: they are American natives.

A word about Noah’s Garden. When I first read it, I didn’t like it much. I recognized good writing, but I thought the subject was old and tired and the presentation a bit preachy. What I failed to take into account was that it was written a good fifteen years before I read it. The idea of saving native plants by growing them in gardens – which now seems obvious – was not yet part of the gardeners’ collective consciousness when the book was published in 1993. Imagine how many years of work and study went into it before publication. So I plan to reread it, with a more open mind. A garden writer who loves Vacciniums must have something important to say.

Coral Honeysuckle

What exactly is a wildflower? I think everyone has his own definition, but mine is any plant with attractive flowers which grows and blooms without horticultural efforts. On the other hand, you could make a good argument for including any native plant – even those now under cultivation in someone’s garden. Ah, but what about perfectly lovely plants which have escaped the garden and now live free (and peaceably without threatening their neighbors) wherever they choose?

Earlier this week, I showed you two plants that would meet anybody’s definition of a wildflower – bluets and native azaleas. Today, let’s talk about some plants that resist categorization.

Coral Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens) is native to North America, but is perfectly at home in many gardens, including mine. It’s going to be in spectacular full bloom in a few days, but doesn’t look half bad right now. The photo at the top of this post was taken yesterday in the kitchen garden at Tangled Branches South, where the honeysuckle twines around a rustic trellis. If you need another reason to grow it besides its obvious beauty – one word: hummingbirds! They love it. Oh, and it also has a long season of bloom. The photo below was taken in July 2009.

But what about another kind of wildflower – the one that long ago lived in someone’s garden and is still charming outside the garden?

Narcissus x medioluteus

These narcissus live at the wood’s edge. I first saw their flowers in the spring of 2007, and then noticed that they grow wild all over central Virginia. I wrote a long post about them two years ago, but the short version is that they’re a naturally-occurring hybrid of Narcissus tazetta and Narcissus poeticus which probably originated in the south of France. The Latin name in current use is Narcissus x medioluteus, but was also known as Narcissus biflorus. It’s been a resident of gardens for hundreds of years. I like to imagine that mine are descendants of a bulb brought on a long sea voyage by one of Virginia’s early colonial settlers. The illustration below is from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, published in the late 1700s.

And yesterday in my non-garden.

Narcissus x medioluteus

Please join Gail at Clay and Limestone and other wildflower fans around the internet for more Wildflower Wednesday blog posts.

Rhododendron periclymenoides aka Pinxterbloom

Rhododendron periclymenoides or Pinxterbloom? Neither one is a very attractive name if you ask me. All azaleas belong to the genus Rhododendron, and periclymenoides means honeysuckle-like. But Pinxterbloom? Because it’s pink? That would have been my guess and it would have been wrong. According to the Sierra Club Potomac’s Hiker’s Notebook:

The term is of Dutch origin as a shortened form of Pinxter blomachee which translates roughly as blossoming on the Pentecost. The religious protestant Dutch settlers of the Hudson River Valley noted that the flower reached full bloom near the date of this very important Christian Church festival.

In central Virginia, however, they bloom in April. These grow in several places in our woods. Those near the back of the lot (furthest south, hmm) always bloom first. About 10 days ago, I took a photo of the first flower – on a tall plant, over my head.

Azaleas over my head

With the recent heat wave, the flowers aren’t lasting long. The flowers below (different plant than above) are already starting to fade. They’re probably in the sunniest location of any we have and began blooming late last week.

Native Azalea, Rhododendron periclymenoides

We noticed a dark swallowtail butterfly repeatedly nectaring on that plant a few days ago, but didn’t get close enough for a positive ID. I’ve read that hummingbirds migrate northward with the blooming of azaleas, but I’ve never seen a hummingbird near these flowers. Nevertheless, several websites mention Pinxterbloom as a hummingbird nectar source and it may be true so I’ll keep watching. I know the hummingbirds are back because one buzzed me a couple days ago when I was wearing an orange sweatshirt.

Rhododendron periclymenoides isn’t the only native azalea, although it’s the only one at Tangled Branches South. If you’re lucky enough to find native azaleas and need help identifying them, Donald Hyatt has written a good online guide to East Coast species.

Rhododendron periclymenoides

This is my second contribution to Clay and Limestone’s Wildflower Week. Tomorrow is the monthly Wildflower Wednesday there, and here at Tangled Branches we’ll be discussing the question “Wild or Cultivated?”.

Houstonia caerulea

One of my favorite wildflowers is the earliest “real” wildflower at Tangled Branches South. I call them Bluets, but some folks call them Quaker Ladies or Blue-eyed Babies, and some folks call them something else (five or six common names are mentioned in one of my wildflower books). A botanist will tell you they’re called Houstonia caerulea. I wondered where the genus name Houstonia came from, but found out it’s nothing to do with Texas. It’s named for William Housto(u)n, who lived from 1695 to 1733 and collected plants in Central American and the West Indies.

The first thing I like about this plant is that it begins flowering at that time of early spring when everything is still cold and gray and you’re trudging along with eyes on the ground and something different catches your eye. The first bluet!. This year it was March 15, with just a few flowers open. They just keep increasing in number until ???? I don’t know when they stop blooming, I only know when they start.

A clump of Bluets

They seem to prefer the woodland edges, but aren’t opposed to growing in the lawn. The clump pictured above is between the driveway and the woods – a sort of semi-cultivated area (we mow it sometimes). The flowers are tiny, but worth looking at closely. They have those sparkly petals that I just love, and a yellow patterned throat – like a flower in a flower. Click the photo below to better see the sparkle.

Bluets have that sparkle

If you’d like to know more about Houstonia caerulea, these are some interesting sites:

• Sierra Club, Potomac Region, Hiker’s Notebook
• Illinois Wildflowers
• Curtis’s Botanical Magazine (via the University of Iowa)

I have plenty of wildflowers to show you this week. Tomorrow, native azaleas.

And really, there’s not all that much in bloom at Tangled Branches South. We continue to focus on the kitchen garden but I’d be unhappy without flowers, so I add them as time and space permit. You’d think mid-April would be mid-Daffodil-Season, but mine are just about finished. Still blooming are ‘Dottie’s Dream’, ‘Salome’, some of the Rinus Rim Mixture.

Narcissus 'Dottie's Dream'

Narcissus 'Salome'

The tulips are just about at peak bloom. I don’t have any of the big ones, they’d be a bit later than these. Currently blooming are T. clusiana ‘Tinka’, T. clusiana ‘Cynthia’, Lily-flowered tulip ‘Mona Lisa’, and Lily-flowered tulip ‘Ballerina’.

Tulipa clusiana 'Tinka'

Tulip 'Ballerina'

Continuing on with some dramatic colors (Ballerina is a very attention-grabbing orange), we have a red pulsatilla. Now I may be a bit delusional about this – maybe it’s really more of a wine-red or reddish-purple – but it was sold to me as red and so that’s what I’m calling it. You can see that the fresher flowers are more red and the older, more purple.

Pulsatilla vulgaris

I was captivated by the colors of these pansies/violas a few weeks at Strange’s Garden Center in Richmond, VA. They’re ‘Nature Mulberry Shades‘, and the flowers range from purple to purple-orange to browninsh-orange. (Note to photographers – check your camera settings before starting to shoot. I left the camera set to ISO1600 and that caused these photos to be grainy. I plan to post more pictures of these violas to better show the range of colors, and I will check the camera settings first.)

Viola 'Nature Mulberry Shades'

We have various violas popping up everywhere, including the gravel driveway, but this one happens to be in the pea gravel around the porch. It’s a descendant of ‘Bowles’ Black’.

Viola (offspring of 'Bowle's Black')

I once planned to have a pool of early-flowering blue bulbs around a pair of trees in the crook of our driveway, but one of the trees died in a drought. The bulbs, however, are very happy with the dead tree roots and this Ipheion ‘Rolf Fiedler’ has filled in to an almost solid mat of flowers, now a little past their prime.

Ipheion 'Rolf Fiedler'

And lastly, ending this post the way it began, with subtle color and beautiful form.

Japanese Maple 'Omure Yama'

And earlier in the week I was awakened at 5:45 in the morning by a cardinal singing right outside the bedroom window. So now this post is about springtime nature songs.

The frogs always start singing around the first of March at Tangled Branches South. The first year we were here I thought they were Spring Peepers, but now I know that the first ones we hear are Chorus Frogs. Specifically, Upland Chorus Frogs (Pseudacris feriarum). I’ve heard them every spring since 2007, but never seen a single one. They’re tiny things – the Virginia Herpetological Society says the largest one ever recorded was a whopping 1.5 inches long. They’re also a nice mud brown color, or so I’m told, because as I said, I’ve never seen one. But I know where they live because when they start singing they’re impossible to ignore – the sound is that loud. So last Friday, a sunny pleasant day, I headed for the source of the sound – a nearby stream. This isn’t much of a stream, more of a ditch really, with a few inches of water in it. This is what I heard.

Although I’ve never seen an adult Chorus Frog, I found the result of all that singing. Frog spawn.

Frog Eggs

With any luck, those dark spots will turn into tadpoles and then into frogs. Since that photo was taken, however, we’ve had two heavy rainstorms (and it’s pouring rain and rumbling thunder again right now). I went back earlier this afternoon to see if the eggs were still there but found none.

Now I’m a little confused about what I see in that photo. According something I read (and can’t find again), each species of frog lays eggs in a particular pattern. The eggs attached to the stem in the water look to me like a different pattern than blobs nearby. What do you think? Should I be listening for more than one type of frog song in early March?

Crocus sieberi 'Tricolor'

…to the very tall.

Red Maple

Truly. The crocus is just a few inches high and the maple flowers are 30 to 40 feet above my head.

It’s all about reproduction.

Tuesday, a pair of Phoebes were in the backyard. Uh oh, it’s time to protect the porch lights already.

Wednesday, a pair of Red-shouldered Hawks were mating in the nearby trees (repeatedly).

Spring is springing here at Tangled Branches South.