We gardeners are human. When hot days come we want to sway in the hammock and just watch the garden bloom.
No flowers are better suited to this resistance to work than the wild flowers that arrive at their peak of beauty in summer sun. Every color of the rainbow, every form and fragrance can be had almost for the asking. Late summer is the time of abundance when earth pours forth the fruits of its season of preparation to insure growth and green for future generations of plants and for man.
The problem of using wild flowers for the summer garden is mainly one of selecting those which delight you most and which fit the conditions you have for them. There are wild flowers for every kind of sunny situation: rocks, bogs, brook-sides, meadows and open fields.
Yellow silken blooms of prickly pear bring glory to rocks in July. When these are planted in company with three-leaved cinquefoil, bearherry, hay-scented fern, poppy mallows and low penstemons (from the West) no one should wish for more beauty.
A sandy hillside can be a sea of blue with wild lupine. These pioneers are hard to transplant but they will grow from seed and increase fertility of the soil.
A clayey field will wave with lavender blazing star. A boggy spot can be ruddy with pitcher-plants and sundews among the green sphagnum moss. In the damp grasses of the surrounding sunny meadows the exquisite grass-pink orchid will grow with delicate blue lobelia, where, in September, fringed gentians and the white stars of grass-of-Parnassus appear. By the side of a brook which is a lazy trickle in midsummer, cardinal-flower and turtlehead will contrast in red and white splendor from midsummer to frost.
Besides the flowers for special situations, there are all the flowers of the open fields from which to choose. In nature’s field gardens, many kinds bloom gaudily together against a background of blue sky, competing with each other for the attention of the hovering bees, moths, butterflies and hummingbirds. These flower forms and colors are hold: rich gold, purples, reds. They are surrounded with full-blown greens of summer grasses and leaves. In mid-August our fields and roadsides rival the most magnificent flower display never seen anywhere.
Great Expanse Not Necessary
It is not necessary to have a great expanse of garden to grow the field flowers. They can he used to make sunny borders, to edge a path, to bring color to a corner or along a fence. My own garden borders a section of lawn and makes the transition into the field beyond. With few exceptions, these flowers, whose native home is the sunny open field, are perennials and once planted come up and increase every year. They are the plants which are least demanding of special soils, preferring garden loam on the compact side. Too rich soil is actually harmful. Rich soil will encourage them to read’ for the sky so that wands of blazing star and black cohosh, Joe-Pye, and even rose mallow, will shoot up to 10 feet high, and goldenrod and asters will topple over with their weighty flower heads.
Many of these summer field flowers are composites, the most highly developed family of the whole vegetable kingdom. Composite flowers are just what the word implies. Small, inconspicuous, individual but complete flowers are grouped together for mutual advantage into heads resembling one large flower, which makes a more impressive show to lure passing insects upon which the flowers depend for cross fertilization. The “petals” of an aster or a daisy or a sunflower are not petals at all but are actually individual flowers, usually infertile like drones, modified to resemble handsome petals. Together with the individual flowers in the center they masquerade as one large flower. In a large sunflower, as many as 5,000 individual flowers join to form the center.
The majority of these summer flowers efficiently make many seeds with ingenious devices of dispersal. They fly on the wind, catch a ride in the coats of animals and man, or shoot like a pop gun to reach some uncrowded spot of ground outside the perimeter of parental shade. This immense productivity adds to the pleasure of a garden of them. They bloom from June to frost and can be picked freely for decoration.
If space permits, more and more kinds of flowers will join those you already have, as volunteers, until they become so numerous that they begin to crowd each other out or are crowded out by incoming shrubs and trees. The result is that the summer garden of field flowers needs more care to keep it within bounds than encouragement to grow.
If your garden is the open field, you can control the Omits so they will not become too crowded – to the detriment of beauty and health. This is done by mowing the field in late May or early June and again in mid-July. Areas of lilies or other flowers which do not need controls should be cut around carefully by hand. Mowing keeps the more prolific flowers such as asters and goldenrods in check, and prevents brambles, blackberries and red cedar from taking over the field.
But perhaps your summer wild flower garden is in smaller space. It can be satisfying but here fewer kinds of plants will be more effective. Those which will not throw the garden out of proportion should he selected. Some taller plants, like New England aster, can be used in a small garden if they are pinched back or cut down to a height of one or two feet until late July. They will bloom at their regular time in August but on bushier, lower plants.
White spires of cohosh, pink meadowsweet and lilac blazing star blend with orange meadow and American Turk’s-cap lilies, red-orange butterfly weed, black-eyed Susan, lavender Stokes aster, red Oswego tea and wineberry, cat-tails, ferns and grasses. These are joined in August by many more, including the great variety of asters, purple to white, plumes of goldenrod, deep purple ironweed and the red cardinal-flower, which will grow in sun as well as in shade if there is moisture. Many of these favorites have been raised from seed.
Seed should be gathered in the fall and sown out-of-doors in open, prepared ground or in a seed bed of garden loam, then covered with burlap for the winter. This keeps the seeds from washing away hut the burlap should be removed in spring before seeds germinate. The young plants can be cared for in the same way as perennials, thinned if necessary and transplanted in the fall or early the following spring to their permanent places. Some blooms can be expected the second summer. Set the small plants in groups for mutual protection or plant them out in rows until common sense says they are able to take care of themselves in competition with other plants in their environment.
As most of these plants are perennials, the clumps will increase in size over the years and will need dividing when they become too large for your garden. Many self-sow, like the biennal black-eyed Susan which always seems to choose the right place to come up to make the greatest- show. Grasses are a part of the natural habitat of these flowers. They keep the roots cool and act as a mulch to the soil, conserving moisture and preventing soil from washing away. So in the garden, too, these flowers should have among them grasses or ferns such as hay-scented or bracken, or the ground should be shaded with a 2-inch mulch of soft grass clippings.
These should be added gradually so the clippings dry but do not rot. This will keep the weeds down and reduce the need for disturbing the plants. In hot weather pull weeds cautiously; in dry weather, not at all. Plants whose roots have been loosened will dry out. These summer wild flowers of the fields will survive a drought but they will bloom better if they are occasionally soaked during dry spells. Keep in touch with the soil under the mulch and water only when it is beginning to feel dry. Too much water will develop plants that are leggy and out of proportion.
As the last aster fades in October, it is time to lift clumps which need to be divided for next summer’s garden. although summer-flowering plants also can be divided in the spring. If plants are to be purchased from a distant nursery, however, order them for fall shipment. Experience has shown that spring delivery may come too late for plants to take hold that summer and in some cases a hot spell during shipment has caused plants to arrive in a state of green decayÑa complete loss.
In my own garden, I give preference in fall chores to the woodland flowers which bloom in early spring, for these must be planted, moved or separated in the fall, while summer flowers can wait until April. The spring-blooming flowers, such as mertensia and phlox, multiply almost as rapidly as the summer-blooming wild flowers. The summer-blooming wild flower garden does not require additional mulching for winter as the early woodland garden does. But it is well to water all wild flowers before winter sets in; evergreen boughs are desirable for protective cover.
by H Hull
