Click below to listen to my 2 min. Garden Bite radio show: Zone envy for American native plants
Those of us with northern gardens sometimes have zone envy! As I’ve talked about before, climate change is changing our frost dates, temperatures are rising and I’m thinking we could test the waters for zone 5 native plants.
There are a few that really caught my eye. Indian Pink (Spigelia marilandica) (pretty sounding name), is a tropical looking plant that grows to about 18 inches.
It’s the flowers that really knocked my socks off. They’re radiant red tubular flowers with yellow throats just made for hummingbirds. Butterflies also dig them. This is a great plant for a rain garden in part shade. They really do like moist soil. Plants will fill in to form a groundcover in the right conditions. Indian Pink blooms early to mid-summer.
Another really cool zone 5’er is Camas (camassia leichtlinii). This is a neat clump forming plant that grows to 3 feet tall to 2 ft. wide from a tulip-like bulb.
The blue-violet flowers appear in loose racemes in late spring and last up to 3 weeks. Camas is another great plant for the rain garden although it prefers more sun than Indian Pink. The nectar attracts bees, butterflies and more. Camas will naturalize in moist soils.
And then there’s a great groundcover called Allegheny spurge. The plant, aka pachysandra, grows 6 to 12 inches tall and has blue-green strongly toothed leaves mottled with purple and white.
There are tiny white fragrant flowers but it’s really grown for foliage. It’s great for the woodland garden as it prefers shade. A great groundcover.
