Native Plants for the Short Season Yard: Best Picks for the Chinook and Canadian Prairie Zones

Native Plants for the Short Season Yard

Native Plants for the Short Season Yard

Best Picks for the Chinook and Canadian Prairie Zones

LYNDON PENNER

Copyright © 2016 Lyndon Penner

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Editorial: Vanessa Young, Sandra Bit

Cover design: Dean Pickup; Cover image: © Adrian Ciurea | Dreamstime.com

Interior layout and design: Carol Dragich, Dragich Design

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Penner, Lyndon, 1980-, author

Native plants for the short season yard : best picks for the Chinook and Canadian prairie zones / Lyndon Penner.

Includes index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55059-664-9 (paperback).—ISBN 978-1-55059-665-6 (pdf). —

ISBN 978-1-55059-666-3 (mobi).—ISBN 978-1-55059-667-0 (epub)

1. Native plant gardening—Prairie Provinces. 2. Gardens—Prairie Provinces--Design. 3. Endemic plants—Prairie Provinces. I. Title.

SB439.26.C3P45 2016 635.9’51712 C2016-900165-2 C2016-900166-0

Dedication

This book is dedicated with love to my nephews Reidyn, Kobe and Ashdon.

Violets are great companions to these native ostrich ferns. These violets are hybrids, but you could use almost any of our native species and the effect would be equally lovely.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Section One: The Practical Bits

1 The basics

2 Why can’t I find this plant at a nursery?

3 Propagating native plants

4 Designing with native plants

Section Two: Native Prairie Plants

5 Plants for open, sunny spaces

6 Plants for partial-to-full shade

Section Three: Potential Threats to Native Plants

7 Invasive and introduced species

8 Human interventions

9 How can you help?

Section Four: Many Voices: People Using Native Plants Across the Prairies

10 The interviews

Section Five: The Section with Lists

11 What's on your list?

Photo Credits

Index

Roses and clematis are a popular pairing, but when we combine them, we are usually thinking in terms of the blooms! Here, rosehips and clematis seedheads make striking and memorable companions for late-season interest.

Acknowledgements

A book isn’t something that just magically puts itself together. There are a lot of people involved. I am grateful to the publisher, the editors, the team that lays out the photos—everyone who works so hard at taking my manuscript and polishing it and turning it into something beautiful and useful. Thank you very much! I couldn’t do it without you. Thank you in particular to Vanessa, who continues to make writing a book an enjoyable process even when the process isn’t enjoyable.

Next I would like to thank my family. I should be more specific and say I would like to thank all of the various families to which I belong. My nephews, my sisters, my grandparents, my parents, and my cousins Lynsey and Matt comprise the first half. Then there are the families that have adopted me. The Lamberts (in particular, Lisa, Esther, Caden, Tom, Jennifer and especially Scott) have been exceedingly generous and kind to me, and I am so grateful. I don’t know where I would be without you guys. In Calgary, Dan and Carol Huber have adopted me and lavished great care upon me, for which I am immensely thankful. Mary Lynn and Andy Hogg along with Krista, Kurtis and Ozzy have absorbed me as one of their own for some reason and actually like my weird sense of humor and like having me in the house. You guys always make me feel welcome and important at your house, and I never laugh and smile as much as I do when I am with you. Thank you for encouraging me in my writing.

Thank you to my CBC family, both the staff and the listeners. I am so proud and so honoured to be associated with all of you who work so hard to be Canada’s voice and to be our national broadcaster. You do such a tremendous job, and I wish everyone could see how hard you work behind the scenes to make radio so enjoyable. The CBC listening audience has been overwhelmingly supportive of my work, and I am so thankful to all of you who take the time to send me your comments, who come up to me at conferences and say how much you love listening to my column—my career would never have been what it is if not for CBC radio. I couldn’t have done it without you, the listeners.

I would also like to thank my Waterton family—spending time in our most beautiful national park as a wildflower advocate and guide has been one of the great joys of my life. I want to thank Beth and Andy Towe, Mary Anne and Barney Reeves, and Holly and Tim Lauscher in particular. I’d also like to thank Charlie and John Russell, both of whom have so generously shared their time, their knowledge and their experiences not just with me but with so many, and we are all better for it.

I am blessed with a wide assortment of friends in all shapes and sizes and ages and races and colours and creeds and nationalities. Thank you to all of you who encourage me, spend time with me, call me, check on me, feed me, bring me plants, ask me for plants, think about me and generally keep me on the right track. You all know who you are, and I know I don’t need to name specific names, but there are a few people who deserve some special recognition this time around for the creation of this book in particular.

Cheryl Lindberg, I really wish I could convey to you how much you inspire me and how much I adore you.

Esther Bresch, you and I have been friends for nearly 20 years and you have always encouraged me, always cared about me, and always been a good friend. Thank you for the book of poetry. I know that one morning I will get a call telling me you’ve gone, and I will miss you very much when that time comes. I will always remember how much fun we had in the garden or just sitting at your table drinking coffee and talking about orchids.

Jamie Gervais, I will never find someone who adores pugs and stars and purple as much as you do. You are so funny and beautiful and smart and generous and important. Thank you for being on this journey with me. I can’t believe that you aren’t featured as some sort of significant attraction in all of Vancouver’s tourism guides.

Ian Wilson and Jacinthe Lavoie must be thanked because without them, I would never have seen the glacier poppy or the Jones’s columbine. I can only try to convey how thrilling both of those experiences were and I hope we get to do stuff like that again in the future. (Incidentally, there are some gentians I would like to see, and also at least one species of lady’s slipper that I haven’t yet come across. Ha ha.)

The Medicine Hat Horticultural Society has been especially supportive, and I would like to thank each member personally, but they only give me so much space here to write my thanks, but you know who you are. Thank you also to Jeanette Malak, who always provides me with coffee and a place to stay when I’m in town.

Meghan Grant, thank you to you and Pat for adopting me in June when I was temporarily in between residences and for being so patient with my coming and going at weird hours. You have always been there for me when I need you, and you never ask a thing in return. You are rare indeed.

Thank you to our provincial minister of the environment Shannon Phillips for protecting the Castle Wilderness even in the face of opposition and for illustrating that positive change is not only possible, but that it is necessary.

Thank you to Alice Middleton and Margaret Cahan, who are like dear aunts that I don’t get to see often enough. We always have so much fun together, don’t we? Looking forward to more walks at Riverview and more giggles!

Thank you to Elizabeth May, who speaks the truth even when it is unpopular. You continue to be an outstanding example to me of integrity, courage, hard work and determination.

This may sound strange, but I would really like to thank Dolly Parton. I will probably never get to meet her, and she will probably never have any idea that she mattered to me. Nevertheless, Dolly’s music has been played in our house since literally before I was born. I love her for her voice, her incredibly sharp song-writing skills, her sense of humour, her determination and her insistence that we can and should care about people. She has been such an advocate for literacy and the arts and equality, and every time I listen to her music, I feel better and I think better and she makes me want to be a better person. Dolly’s music plays in my truck multiple times a week, and it is what I listened to most during the writing of this book. I continue to be inspired by her, and so to her I offer my thanks.

I would like to thank all the wonderful people who let me interview them for this book and thus make the book so much richer. Thank you for your time and for sharing your experiences so openly, and thank you to every single one of you out there who has bought my books or attended classes that I teach, or taken the time to send me emails or comment on my blog or send me tweets. Thank you to all of you who love our native plants and have been champions and advocates on their behalf. Thank you to all the people who have been agents of change and guardians of threatened wilderness for your hard work and dedication. Finally, thank YOU, dear person reading these words, for having an active interest in our botanical citizens and for making a step towards a more sustainable landscape. I hope you will find yourself inspired in these pages and that you will marvel at the feast of flowers that has been set before us.

Native plants on a mountainside

Introduction

When I was about six or seven years old, Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris made an album together called Trio. I remember that album very well, and in particular, one song always appealed to me. The song Wildflower was written by Dolly about the desires she had as a young woman to go out and see the world, and how she couldn’t stay in her small town forever. In the chorus of the song, she sings about wildflowers not caring where they grow and I took the song quite literally. I remember wondering if wildflowers really did not actually care where they grew.

As I got older and learned more about gardening, I began to develop a fascination with native plants. Seeing indigenous species in the wild became a big thrill for me. I was fortunate enough to have teachers and a librarian who encouraged my desire to learn (thank you, Mrs. Jones!). In grade seven I came across the book Wildflowers Across the Prairies by F.R. Vance, J.R. Jowsey and J.S. McLean. This book became my most used reference and to this day it is probably one of the most worn out books on my shelf, all but falling apart from such frequent use.

I spent countless hours investigating the wild spaces of my youth. Some of my earliest memories are of walking with my grandma in the pasture in early spring, looking for the first prairie crocuses. I remember the intense thrill of finding western red lilies, my provincial flower, growing on the grounds of our small town elementary school; I remember the first time I found smooth camas and recognized them from my wildflower book. Every time I find a plant growing in the wild that I haven’t seen before, I am thrilled and faintly astonished to see it in real life.

To have a plant from a textbook or reference manual suddenly before you as a living thing is a hard thing to explain. It’s a bit like recognizing a movie star when one day, they sit down beside you in a restaurant. No amount of fine photography or detailed botanical descriptions mentally prepares you for that moment when your mind asks, "Is that an orchid over there?" followed by recognition. I remember reading recently that in the 1950s, the average Canadian child could recognize over 25 different kinds of wildflower. In 2012, the average Canadian child did not recognize any of their local flora but knew over 50 different corporate brand logos. How the world has changed, and not for the better.

When I became an adult and started to do professional landscape design, I soon realized that if I wanted a plant to succeed, I had to place it where it wanted to be and not where I wanted it to be! Inspiration for landscape designs comes to me often through wild places. I am tremendously grateful to live in a place where I can go out and find untouched land where wildflowers still flourish. I grew up in Saskatchewan and quickly learned that Grasslands National Park was a magical place. As an adult, I often work in Waterton Lakes National Park, though there are certainly other wild places that have also endured close scrutiny and detailed notes when I visit them. I am constantly assessing what plants are doing in the wild. Where does this plant grow? What does this plant grow with? What would be good companions for this plant?

Grasslands National Park, Saskatchewan

Some of my very best landscape designs have been directly copied from things I saw in nature. The first time I found a cactus in the wild I was flabbergasted. Cactus grew somewhere other than Arizona or Texas!?! Cactus could handle winter!?! Some time later, I made a detailed investigation of what prickly pear cactus grows with and where it grows, and I copied that in a landscape plan. It turned out flawlessly. I learned that if I could simulate in a garden the same conditions that a plant chooses in the wild, I could make it grow. I could make it flower and flourish and succeed! This was encouraging to me. As much as I love using garden plants that are not native where I live (such as dahlias and tulips), I have also developed a deep fondness for plants that come from the same place I come from.

I learned very quickly that many of the things I found growing in the woods or on the mountain side were not available from my local garden centres and greenhouses. In the beginning, I couldn’t figure out why. Surely a beautiful plant that flourishes in our climate should be readily available for sale! There are certainly reasons why they are not so readily available, and we will discuss the special needs of our native plants in more detail as we get deeper into the book.

Section One

The Practical Bits

By conserving native plants where they grow, we are also helping to conserve the other creatures that rely on them for food and survival.

1

The basics

What exactly is meant by the term native plant? That’s an excellent question! When people use this term, they might mean native to North America, they might mean native to Canada, they might mean native to the province, or they might (but rarely) mean native to just a specific ecosystem. I remember a gardening friend once saying, if it doesn’t grow within 100 km of my house, it’s not a native plant!

Native plant can be a very broad or a very specific label, depending on context. Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba are often collectively referred to as the Prairie Provinces. They are also home to an extremely diverse collection of ecosystems including both tall grass and shortgrass prairies, deciduous and coniferous forests, the semi-arid and almost desertlike landscapes of the badlands, the fens and bogs of the north, lakes and rivers, and of course the Rocky Mountains in southwestern Alberta.

I am proud to be from the prairies, and I bristle when people who are not from here speak of our lands as being boring and nothing but canola fields. This is not the truth; we are blessed with a tremendous assortment of habitats and a corresponding population of unique and often stunningly beautiful plants.

For the purposes of this book, when I refer to native plants, I am speaking of any species that naturally occurs anywhere in Alberta, Saskatchewan and/or Manitoba. This means that plants that occur naturally as inhabitants of Banff’s and Jasper’s mountains are given equal billing as native plants in the same way that plants from the spectacular grasslands of Saskatchewan and Manitoba are also native plants. They come from different habitats, but they are still found within the boundaries of the three provinces I know and love best.

The goal of this book is to introduce you to some of the beguiling, beautiful and absolutely enchanting plants that call the Prairie Provinces home. I’d love to encourage people to use more native plants in their gardens (which in turn encourages local pollinators), and I’d love for folks to come away with a deeper appreciation for our own natural history and natural beauty. People do not generally grow native plants, but these plants deserve our respect and admiration. They are dismissed as being unattractive, hard to grow, weedy, not worth bothering with, or simply too wild for a modern yard. The same people who make these criticisms may spend thousands of dollars trying to grow roses, hydrangeas and azaleas that are often totally unsuited to our climatic conditions. Plants that are unsuited to our conditions struggle to stay alive, making them susceptible to pests and diseases, and then we use pesticides and fertilizers as life support for a plant that doesn’t really belong here.

Native plants, by virtue of the fact that they evolved to suit the conditions we naturally have, are usually considerably lower maintenance and less work than plants that did not.

Looking for native plants along an alpine lake in Alberta

Getting to know plants native to your area is a good way to become familiar, even intimate, with the land where you live. Knowing what existed before that strip mall or new subdivision was built is valuable information—information that is rapidly disappearing. Entire ecosystems are being wiped out before we even know what we’ve lost! For many years, I have been on a crusade to grow and promote our native plants. One of the ways I’ve really gotten to know what lives where I live is by spending as much time as I can in wild places or national parks and carefully observing plant communities. What grows where? What is it growing with? How much sun or shade does it receive? Where does the plant seem happiest?

Sourcing native plants from the wild

Gardeners are as susceptible to coveting and lust as any other group of collectors. At some point along our gardening journey, many of us have dug a plant up that we’ve discovered in a ditch or a pasture and moved it home only to find that it dies in very short order. Sometimes digging a plant out of the wild is borne out of a desire to possess it; other times it’s from a misguided sense of frugality. I’m often asked, Why should I go to a nursery and pay money for this plant when I could just dig it out of the forest? Aside from important ethical concerns and potentially significant ecosystem issues, it simply isn’t practical.

Most well-established plants don’t transplant easily, and native plants in their native landscape have filled their specialized niche so well that they often don’t survive transplanting at all. Trying to dig up and move a native plant frequently results in its death and usually introduces new weeds to your garden in the process. If you buy the same plant from a nursery, it’s going to have been conditioned differently than a plant that started life in the wild, and you aren’t going to bring weeds or pests home. The probability that it will actually live is also significantly higher. (To say nothing of the fact that you won’t be disturbing an ecosystem and you’ll also be helping out a local small business.)

Throughout this book I will introduce you to some wonderful native plants that you should be enjoying either in your garden or in the wild—preferably both.

Please remember that it is never ok to remove entire plants from the wild, even if those plants are growing on property that you own.

If you find a plant in the wild that you like, the first thing to do is to identify it. Take a photo of it and bring it to a local garden centre, or get yourself a good guidebook. Once you know what it is, it is easy to find out if it’s something that is available for sale. If not, perhaps you could propagate it yourself. Taking cuttings from native plants is acceptable and often a very good way to get one for your garden. I have taken cuttings from native honeysuckles, clematis, ninebark, penstemons, bearberry and a few others. Be sure to be respectful, and do not take more than you need.

You could also gather some of the seeds. Mark the spot where the plant grows and keep an eye on it. Many native plants are easy to germinate, but some are not. Be thoughtful when you gather seeds. You don’t know how many years it has been since that plant had enough nutrients to actually produce seeds, and you don’t know what small creatures may be relying on those seeds as a food source. Never take more than 10 per cent of the seeds from any given native plant population. If you aren’t sure how to germinate them, there are many wildflower and native plant societies, nurseries and enthusiast groups on the Internet who could likely advise you. In many cases, trial and error is often how we learn these things, so feel free to experiment with different techniques.

Gathering coneflower seeds

Native plants are sometimes slow to establish and will not flower well or be showy in the garden until they are a few years old. This is one reason that nurseries often don’t want to offer them—they rarely offer instant gratification. Some plants behave very differently in cultivation than they do in the wild and can thus be a problem. Be cautious about plants labeled wildflowers or native plants. The term wildflower is often used very liberally by seed companies and nurseries to mean any self-sowing annual. It’s basically any plant that, if you turn your back on it for just a second, will go wild. It probably isn’t anything native to your area and is probably something you don’t actually want in your flowerbed, much less freely sowing itself around your property and competing with our native wildflowers.

The term native plant is often used to mean native to Canada, making it too vague to be really useful. This is a big country and what is native to the east coast may not be native to Alberta. A purple coneflower that is native to Ontario is probably not the same species that is found in Saskatchewan. Do your research and make your plant choices based on the specific conditions in your yard. Even within a province, things can vary greatly. Native plants that are ideal for Maple Creek and Estevan may not make great choices for a garden in Nipawin or La Ronge, even though all of those places are in Saskatchewan. A plant that grows high in the mountains of southern Alberta may not be happy in Red Deer or Edmonton.

Pay careful attention to what sort of ecosystem a plant comes from, because this is the key to determining where it wants to be in your garden. A few native plants simply do not adapt to gardens at all as they may have very precise relationships with mycorrhizal fungi that are not readily reproduced, or they may come from high altitudes where the conditions would be impossible to recreate. In these kinds of instances, these are plants best photographed and enjoyed in the wild. Sometimes, hybrid or garden forms of native plants are better choices than the unrefined species itself. Don’t be a purist. Goldenrods (Solidago spp.) are lovely native plants that flower late in the year and attract butterflies, but in a garden environment some of the native forms can be floppy and prone to mildew. The hybrid forms of goldenrod (largely developed in Germany) are more compact, flower longer and have better disease resistance. The prairie crocus (Pulsatilla spp.) may be fine as a garden plant, but the hybrid forms have much larger flowers, deeper colouring and are a lot showier. They also flower significantly longer and produce a larger number of blossoms than their wild counterparts.

Native crocus is lovely, but a hybrid crocus like this one is far more visible and usually performs better in your garden than the native species. 

Greenhouses sourcing native plants from the wild

How should you respond when your favourite garden centre is selling plants that you know were dug from the wild? My first response is generally indignation. How dare a business exploit a wild population of plants, disturbing an ecosystem. This is unacceptable!

One of my first mentors regarding native plants was Peggy Ryan, formerly the head of collections at the W.P. Fraser Herbarium at the University of Saskatchewan. She used to teach classes about gardening with native plants, and I hung on her every word. She was the first gardener I ever met whose yard was heavily planted with native plants. She had hostas and petunias and seemingly more normal things, but she also grew native columbines, baneberry, scarlet mallow and a whole host of other delights.

Peggy said that we should not support nurseries or greenhouses that sold wild-dug plants, and we should make it clear to them why we were shopping elsewhere. We have to send a message to the industry that native plants should be preserved where they are and not exploited or harmed. I took her words very seriously and clung to them like a drowning person hangs onto a life raft. Flash forward a few years, and I find myself working at a garden centre in Calgary and responsible for the perennials. We get in two enormous burlap bags filled with fern crowns the first spring I’m there, and I say to my very reasonable employer, wherever are these from?

He replied, they come out of the bush in northern Saskatchewan.

Ferns abound in forested areas right across the continent.

Uh-oh. At first, I was horrified. How could I work at a nursery that sold wild-dug plants? How could I, in good faith, sell something to a customer that I knew had come out of a forest somewhere and was not nursery propagated? I thought about the beautiful fern-filled forests of northern Saskatchewan and pictured bulldozers and landeaters moving in and the ferns being ripped from the ground and the ground then being bulldozed. I pictured plump men in suits with cigars hanging out of their mouths and hanging onto fern-filled sacks emblazoned with a dollar sign. Another day, another bag of ferns for the open market! I imagined one saying, and then rubbing his hands together with glee as the forest burned and every last fern was torn from the earth. I have a pretty active imagination.

I spoke to our general manager about my misgivings and she scoffed and ridiculed me for my tree hugger ways. She told me my concerns were ridiculous. Undeterred, I went to my boss and had a respectful conversation about why this troubled me. My boss said that if I could find another supplier whose