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What's Blooming: Plans for a Wildflower Garden

 

Bee Balm

What’s Blooming:  Plans for a Wildflower Garden

by Sherry Fuller, Horticulturist and Curator, Gardens on Spring Creek 

Wildflowers are popular now for good reason: they are often drought tolerant, easy to maintain and provide food and habitat for our native birds and insects. In this article, I’m using the term wildflower loosely to mean herbaceous native plants with showy flowers. Here are a few things to consider when planning to grow your own wildflower garden from seed.

Choose a location:  Most showy wildflowers native to our area prefer at least six or seven hours of sun a day.  They won’t thrive directly under a large tree or on the north side of a building in the shade.  And while most are quite drought tolerant, they will still need water to get established. An area irrigated with a lawn system will usually work to get plants started but will ultimately be too much water for native plants. An area accessible with a hose would be ideal to provide more water at first, then less as the plants grow. If you have a bare area, that is ideal.  Wildflowers, or any plant, won’t compete with established turf or perennial weeds like bindweed or dandelions, so removing these first is essential. 

Getting Started:  You might be tempted by seed companies’ pictures of fields of flowers and wish that throwing a packet of wildflower seed into your weed patch would magically transform it.  If only it were that easy!  After removing weeds, the soil should be tilled or at least roughed up a bit with a rake.  Appropriate seeds should be spread, raked in and watered thoroughly.  Watering regularly through the first summer will yield the best results, even with drought-tolerant varieties. 

What to Grow:  The term “wildflower” is frequently used to mean any easy-to-grow flower.  If a pretty patch of flowers is your goal, then generic wildflower packs will work fine.  But if you want plants native to our area that will thrive over the years, you’ll need to be a little more selective.  You might want to choose individual varieties including both annuals that will give you flowers all summer and perennials that are much slower to get started but will be longer lived.  

Many “wildflower mixes” contain lots of easy varieties like cosmos, daisies and bachelor buttons.  These aren’t native here and can be so aggressive, they choke out more slow-growing, truly native varieties. There is a list of suggested varieties better for our area below.

In addition to these natives, consider adding a few annual varieties for quick growth and flowers the first year.  Plains coreopsis, California poppy and lemon beebalm aren’t strictly native to Colorado but they do adhere to the spirit of our natives and will fit in nicely with any of the other plants listed. 

When to Plant:  If you have a relatively bare area for planting, throwing seed out in the winter just before or after a snow is effective.  Seeds will germinate with spring moisture and those that need a cold treatment to grow will get that through the winter.  If you need to prepare an area, plant in the spring and water regularly just as you would grass seed until plants are beginning to grow. Water less as they get larger but try to water at least once or twice a week through their first summer.  Adding some container-grown plants in the spring can increase your wildflower garden’s diversity and make your new garden look fuller quickly.

Blue Flax

Suggested Native Perennial Varieties:

·       Gaillardia varieties
·       Mexican hat coneflower, Ratibida columnifera
·       Blue flax, Linum spp.
·       Mintleaf beebalm, Monarda fistulosa
·       Blazing star, Liatris spp.
·       Purple prairie clover, Dalea purpurea
·       Butterfly weed, Asclepias tuberosa
·       Penstemon varieties
·       Engelman’s daisy
·       Columbine, Aquilegia spp.
·       Harebell, Campanula rotundifolia
·       Rocky Mountain beeplant, Cleome serrulata


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