Summary: Using native plants in your landscape can be fun. Obtaining plants can take some work, especially if your are collecting them in their natural growing area. Read these tips on collecting, propagation and care of native plants.
Question: We would like to collect some natives plants to establish them in our home garden. Do you have any tips on how to collect and handle them when we bring them home and plant or nurseries that may grow them? Casey, Martinsville, VA
Answer: Casey, where to obtain native plants can take some work – but very rewarding? There are several reliable dealers who either propagate their own stock or grow collected plants under cultivation for a time before selling them. These nurseries can usually supply a good variety of desirable species.
If you have opportunities for it, collecting your own plants from the wild is fun. And, provided you take certain precautions, it is highly successful and in keeping with sound conservation practice. First and foremost, though, make sure your collecting activities do not violate any state conservation laws. Then, having assured yourself of this, be guided by the following principles:
- Take up practically all of the root system, keep the entire plant damp and replant promptly.
- Leave at least six plants for every one that you collect unless the stand is doomed by approaching road construction, building development, drainage project or other inevitable destruction which justifies you in rescuing as many as you can.
- If the plants are on private property. explain your plan to the owner and obtain his permission before you start in.
- Don’t tell all your friends where you have been and don’t urge them to go there and help themselves.
- Provide soil and other growing conditions similar to that from which the plant comes.
Actually, the most constructive and in many ways, the most satisfying method of obtaining an ample supply of the particular plants you want is to grow your own from seed, cuttings, layers, root divisions or other conventional methods of propagation. This is no more difficult than with the general run of cultivated garden plants. The procedures and materials are practically identical except that, in my experience, late winter and early spring seed sowing in the house or under glass is too tricky to be depended upon.
To give you an idea of the sort of results you can expect from following nature’s basic principles under controlled conditions, it is possible to obtain several hundred seedlings of trailing arbutus from seed sown in a single flat and to flower them in three or four years. A similar number of cardinal flowers will begin to bloom in their second year from seed.
Cold Frame Virtually Essential
A substantial coldframe equipped with slat sun-screens in addition to the regular sash is virtually essential for best results in home propagation of wild flowers. If you plan to use cuttings as well as seeds, get a 2-sash frame and divide it with a tight board partition, installed under the center support bar. Thus, one side of the frame can be used for cuttings and the other for seeds, each operated to provide the conditions most favorable to its content. Coarse, clean sand or a sand and peatmoss mixture can be used to root most kinds of cuttings. One third each of sand, loam and leafmold or fine peatmoss forms a standard sowing medium for seeds. For acid-soil plants the humus portion of the mixture should be strongly acid; oak leaves that have rotted just enough to lose all semblance of foliage are excellent for the purpose.
Whether you buy or collect your perennial wild flower seeds, sow them at once regardless of season. This is nature’s way. There is no simpler plan than to follow her lead and even improve on it by providing better storm, rodent and insect protection through use of the frame.
As with most cultivated garden plants, rooted cuttings, divisions and seedlings of will flowers should be transplanted at least once before going into their permanent locations. Personally. I prefer to make the first shift into individual pots which are then plunged to their rims in damp peatmoss and kept moderately moist until the roots have filled their containers.
