Native Garden Update So Many New Plants Added This Spring

In this video, we're going to take a quick tour of the native garden over here. I think you'll see that it's made quite a bit of progress. We're not in a hurry to finish this area. We're just trying to visit folks, find things that we're not aware of, things that are different or new or whatever. Something that's just not the exact same native garden that you might see everywhere else. One of my favorite things is giant perennials. Love perennials that get, whether they're some native and some non-native. This daylily here that's not native that gets, if you're here for the open garden, it'll have seven or eight foot tall flower spikes on it by then. But one of our great native giants is Rudbeckia maxima, which is a giant coneflower, but they're not technically, Rudbeckia is not technically coneflowers. This is a problem with common names. If I said giant coneflower, you would not think I'm talking about a Rudbeckia, which we tend to refer to as black-eyed Susans. These things get mixed up like that with these types of common names. But you can see year two and a half or so of this being in the ground, the leaves are bigger than my hands here. This one is now up about six and a half feet and flower buds are on it. Had some sort of animal come through here and knock the backside of this plant down and I don't know what the heck happened there. They are very rigid and able to hold themselves up. Typically though, you think about how a lot of these perennials are going to grow. They're usually going to grow in some sort of crowded situation with grasses and flowering perennials and they're going to kind of support each other a little bit and this backside kind of didn't have that. So, you know, whatever it was, an animal or whatever that went through here that knocked these over. So we're just going to let them flower down on the ground. But you can see flower buds about to bloom here. Of course, this is in the aster family and the asters are, you know, able to make those composite flowers that have literally, it's a combination of hundreds of individual little flowers together and a sunflower-like flower that it'll be a giant show-off here for the bunch in the next few weeks. But love the color on the leaf. You know, the two sides of the leaf have a different color. The flowers initiate from between the leaf and the stem, you know, which is super unique as well. Just kind of a fun plant here in the garden. But let's take a look at some other things over here. You can see the backside of it laying down there. It looks like an animal or something got in there. You know, kind of unusual for those. They usually hold themselves up. They usually hold themselves up pretty well. One cool thing about that plant is that later in the season, as all those seed form, you know, all those individual flowers and those that make up that sunflower-like flower that you'll see on dahlias and coneflowers and sunflowers and so many things in that aster family, is those seeds will be on them. And because that plant is seven feet tall with the flowers up on the top of it and the seed on the top of it, the gold finches are up there and you can see them swaying as they're pulling those seeds out of those flower heads, which is kind of fun. That's great plant if you like gold finches. The dwarf loblolly pine has really put on some growth. So, it's hit the ground running. You know, loblollies are, you know, generally pretty easy plants to have in the garden. The central leader is, I don't know if I got some sort, I think I got some sort of moth here has caused us a problem on the end of these branches and it's killed that main leader. There is a new one trying to form right there and it's made it quite shrubby. We'll see what it looks like in the future. I don't really, don't really mind either way. These are interesting dwarf selections of loblolly pines that have been around out in the trade for a little while. There's a few at the, on the NC State's campus, a few at the Ralston. You'll run into them occasionally. We had them in the video with Dr. Creech down at the SFA garden. We actually started the video with the dwarf loblollies behind us and those are limbed up into what look like little Dr. Seuss pine trees. This one has started off, it started its life as a shrub, so we'll see what it looks like. We'll see what it looks like later. Who cares? There's a, we have, we put in a viburnum dentatum. We actually have a lot of native viburnums in this garden and we have a lot of native viburnums in the neighborhood, which, which is kind of interesting. Another one that we put, if you look at the front garden tour from last week, there's another viburnum over there that's a more southern selection of dentatum. It's, it's a separate species, but they look very, very similar. You know, where they have the, this kind of serrated leaf around there. Same, similar flower clusters. Usually they develop some sort of blue berry. There's a lot of selections out there of viburnum dentatum now where you get these really bright, bright, almost metallic looking blue fruit on them later in the season. So that one's kind of fun. Let's jump back a little further. We've kind of pushed our construction area all the way back to this back corner as we've been developing the entire garden. I've got some extra mulch back here because we're still planting some things. I figure I need some extra mulch. Got some extra wood chips back here. Got our, Steph and I's cart that we've, Steph and I both have been pushing this cart around for how many years? I don't, 30, 35 years or something like that. I bought these carts these two, two of these green carts from the garden center that Steph and I worked at when it closed, when it closed down. So literally Steph pushed that cart around, putting annuals and perennials and everything on tables for the weekend at the garden center. When we would get, I don't know, the business back then was that every single truck would arrive on Friday morning and by Saturday morning, everything had to be out there despite the fact that there was 8 million customers in your garden center on Friday afternoon, shopping for them off, off of wherever they were laying. It was, it was absolute chaos, absolute chaos. Get your stuff earlier in the week is the better way. I don't think we pointed out that we got, we brought back a dwarf chickapin oak from Grow Wild. We, Mike talked about this in the beginning of that, of that video, but it's transitioned here into the ground. It's probably needed a little bit of fertilizer at the time we put it in the ground. So there's a little bit of dark green veining on that leaf. It's probably a slight iron deficiency, but it'll, it'll green right back up and look good. These, this dwarf chickapin is supposed to be, produce acorns at a fairly young age. That one in his garden, how tall was it Steph? 15 feet or 12, 12 to 15 feet, something like that after a pretty long period of time. So that perfect little small understory tree for back here, dwarfing and happens to produce acorns pretty early on. So it's an important, you know, wildlife, wildlife plant for that reason. There were several deciduous azaleas added to the back garden here, a selection of them. We'll show those off in time. Train is talking to us this morning, as it always does here in the Raleigh garden. The viburnum nudum, we took this out of the back garden. It was in too much shade over there. Transitioned it over here. That train is really loud. Mulberries growing on top of it, which is not our native mulberry. It's either the Chinese mulberry or some sort of cross, but between, between the two. So I got to get that cut off the top of it. And it hasn't transitioned the best. It's alive. It's doing okay. It actually did a little bit of flowering, but I think I'm probably going to give this thing a bit of a haircut here in the next few weeks and try to get it to flush back out a little bit down here at the bottom. We don't mind things limbing themselves up into small trees, but I got to get that cut off the top of it. That non, non-native plant that's above it and get that one cleaned up a bit. Deer damage. You know, we've got a deer that is, you know, came and, you know, the weirdest stuff we have eaten out here. This is a Joe Pieweed, which was happily, we've got another one down the line, just a little bit. One of the dwarf Joe Pieweeds. It was this tall a week ago, and now it's been cut in half. Now this, this is not a plant that's going to die from that, but it's certainly going to maybe bloom, maybe not now. Don't know. Don't know if it'll have enough time before it's done. Another interesting one is somebody brought a lot of the plants that you'll see in this native garden were actually donated in some way or another. There's a Swamp Hobbit here, and when it, it has that little cage around it because when it was brought to us, it was like three leaves. So it's been nursed out to now pretty good size. I mean, almost, it's big enough that you're not going to walk on it now. That's the reason it's had that cage on it. So we just didn't want to walk over the top of it, but it's transitioned beautifully. What's that? Yeah, and it's, it's an Elysium. I got, I called it Swamp Hobbit, but it's a, with the one we call, the Elysium we call Swamp Hobbit stays small. You know, if you see this in gardens, it only gets about a foot tall, 18 inches tall, something like that. Ultimately will take a wider and wider space over time, but not aggressive in any way, shape or form. It's just one of those plants. And when you see this plant in a garden, you'll wonder why it's not used more. It's really just a super low maintenance plant that just requires nothing, native to the Southeast United States. And it's just a compact growing Elysium, lots of different Elysium out in the world from, you know, we've got Elysium Parviflorum on the other side of the building over there. That's 15 feet tall. Then we've got some Asian selections of Elysium in the main garden over there too. And then other native, other native ones in the Southeast as well. One of the other things we brought back from Grow Wild was that Ilex Opeca, that Maryland Dwarf version, which again, every time Steph and I see this out in the, in a garden someplace, it's just a sort of perfect little domed native holly that just looks fantastic everywhere we see it. I mean, but when we go and you're looking at ornamental gardens, it's always Carissa or Compacta or one of the Asians, you know, one of the Asian hollies, but this is just such a good, if you're looking for a low doming, you know, if you've got windows on your house that are four feet high or something like that, that's just a perfect little low doming plant. They were grown kind of close together. So it's stretching a bit, but as soon as I, it's flowering, I see the flowers on it right now. We'll give this thing a haircut. As soon as it settled into the ground, starts putting on some growth, we'll give it a bit of a haircut. And then you can see how much of a, and then it'll, from there, it will just kind of self meatball, kind of, kind of crazy. The Chionanthus pygmaeus, this is a native to Florida Chionanthus or fringe tree has really settled in well. That thing looks absolutely fantastic. This is endangered in the wild. I think we've talked about it before, but it's grafted material and this one has low branched. And so it's not, it's going, it's kind of a shrubby plant in the wild anyway, but it can be tree formed somewhat. We've seen pygmaeus now where somebody has taken the time to actually tree form it into a small, into, into a small tree, but it's a super striking plant, right? So hopefully, you know, this plant, again, when something gets endangered, sometimes we really do weird things with them and, and, you know, don't allow them to cross state lines and blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, cause I guess the fear is somebody is going to dig one up cause it's rare or whatever. And so we certainly don't want that, but at the same time, having it in this garden or some other place makes it less rare, right? And you have a backup plan out in the world. So it's kind of a, it's kind of an interesting dynamic sometimes where, you know, we, our reaction to it being rare or endangered makes it more rare and endangered in some ways. So it'd be nice to be able to protect them in the wild, but also make sure you have some sort of duplicate backup out in the world. The yucca from the front garden, this yucca was, this color guard yucca was in a container in the front garden for three years, probably. It was hardly ever watered. It got watered occasionally, but I mean, it's an unbelievable how, how, how hardy that thing actually is. You know, zone, zone four to 10 or something like that for that color guard yucca. And then, you know, it'll get a flower spike on it at some point. I'm sure it's happier being in the ground than it was in that container, but it was unbelievable. You could just put that thing in a container and then if it gets watered, it gets watered. If it doesn't, it doesn't. And it survived every winter, every summer. Just really, really easy plant. The white buckeye back there is about to start blooming. The red buckeye, which we moved over is behind the camera right now, it's finished flowering at this point. The white, the white buckeye is starting to flower. This entire space between the vegetable garden and the native garden is native perennials. And so there's Amsonia and Baptisia and Liatris. And what else is in here, Steph? Penstemon, Monarda is out here. There are some rudbeckias, various rudbeckias out here, native salvia, goldenrod. Let's see, what am I, I'm sure I'm missing several others. And then there's other native perennials over on the other side as well. Of course, you know, coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, rabbits are, rabbits are definitely an issue when these things are small. You know, Liatris, interestingly, the first few years you put those bulbs in the ground, if you have rabbits, they'll eat them. And then in the future, in future years, though, once the, the colony kind of gets a little bit bigger, I don't know if they just don't taste as good or whatever it is, but your Liatris will fight through that over those first few years. That can, same thing with some of the black-eyed Susans and that kind of thing. The first year or two, they're in the ground. They seem to be tastier. And then they also have more stored energy to get out of the ground and grow faster. The blonde envy elderberry has just gone wild now. And you can see the flowers coming on it. This flower cluster is starting, starting to open. Here's one that's got a few open, open flowers on it. It'll be covered in pollinators later today. Part of our, we were down in Greenville, South Carolina for the, for the magnolia meeting. We were over at Spartanburg Community College, or a few of these planted over there. And Keith Mearns, who found this plant was with us. So I had a little piece of stuff, took a little piece of footage with him standing next to the plant that he selected. But boy, is this thing fast growing. And it was planted and it's like solid wood chips. It's not even probably in an ideal location. And it's really grown very quickly. It's taller than I am now. And I'm right at six foot. So, you know, it's, it's, it's on its way. It's a question. Sometimes I'll question something that starts growing this fast as, you know, will it still be sitting here in three years? I don't know. At this point, we'll see. I would love to be able to limb it up in some way if I could, if it was going to grow this fast, but we'll see what we can do with it. But in the meantime, boy, it's super, super striking out here. One more plant before we wrap this up. This Waccamaw Pancake Dwarf Wax Myrtle is super cool, right? This is just a, this is a super fun plant. Just a ground, it's a ground cover wax myrtle. We think about wax myrtles can get 20 feet tall. If you let them, most people kind of use them as screening plants and box them off just a little bit. There's a ground cover version. We got this from Kevin Paris on a visit down to Spartanburg Community College. Maybe that's been two years ago now or something like that. And then we actually just went back down there and did a tour with the International Magnolia Society group last week. It was a really fun tour. He's got just amazing magnolia breeding he's doing at Spartanburg Community College. We've got one of his magnolias here in the native garden and a few others over there on that side, but this is a plant that he gave us while we were there. He's got a bank of these, you know, it's up on a retaining wall and a slope above a retaining wall. And what a cool native ground cover selection of, you know, one of our, you know, cool plants. The thing about wax myrtles is this is a southern wax myrtle right here. There is northern wax myrtles. There are several species and if you go to the West Coast, there's a whole nother set of species. So almost everybody watching has some version of wax myrtle that they can grow or bay laurel or whatever it's going to be called in that area of the country. It's an interesting one. It's speciated on both coasts basically. So there you go. There's some of the, a few of the things over here in the garden. I think you can see behind me it's quite a bit more filled in than it was before, but we're not rushing. I'm just not trying to throw everything at it. We have taken down a good portion of the Chinese privet and so before the open garden event, we'll have that, the rest of that taken down and there you go. So I think we've shown off now some new plants we added to the back garden, new plants we added to the front garden, containers, the front of the fence, because we really did a lot for the front of the fence on the main garden over there, and now a few of the things over here in the native garden. Everything will be tagged when you come here to the open garden. Everything will have a tag on it so you'll, you know, know what, know what it is while you're here. Hopefully most of these perennials that are kind of in a little bit of a wilt this morning will be settled in and flowering at that time and we'll probably have added a few more things to it as well. So thank you guys so much for following along with it.