How to Naturalize Spring Flower Bulbs in the Landscape
24.07.2023 - 12:01 / hgic.clemson.edu
Spring wildflowers are garden stars in the wooded area of South Carolina Botanical Garden’s Natural Heritage Trail from February to May. The spring herbaceous layer is exceptionally diverse in environments with rich soils containing lots of organic material. Every day something new appears in the landscape!
Spring wildflowers synchronize their lifecycles to the trees above them. Many are spring ephemerals: they pop up, flower, set seed, and die back before the trees completely leaf out. Once the temperatures warm, all signs of Spring beauty disappear. Hepatica is not ephemeral. Hepatica leaves persist and enable it to photosynthesize throughout the year. Look for its lobed leaves on the forest floor all year long.
These plants adapt in other ways to cold temperatures and challenging environmental conditions. Their small stature offers them some protection from harsh weather. Bloodroot flowers are protected by a single enveloping leaf when they first emerge. If you look closely at hepatica, the stems and leaves are covered by tiny hairs that act as insulation. Deer are dissuaded from browsing Jack-in-the-Pulpit and Mayapple by the bitter chemicals each contains. Many of these plants only open their flowers when it’s warm enough for their pollinators to be out. Bloodroot flowers open at 46°, and their primary pollinators, bumblebees, fly at 41°. If pollinators don’t visit, asexual reproduction comes to the fore. Plants are spread instead by stolons, rhizomes, or division of the underground structures.
Many of these spring flowers are an important nectar source for early emerging native bees and other insects. Some bees are generalists and visit multiple flower types. Other bees are more selective, relying on specific flowers:
How to Naturalize Spring Flower Bulbs in the Landscape
Ready for spring 2024? Our new autumn range is here, ready to help you grow the spring garden of your dreams. But what will you grow? Garden trends change every year, and we love to stay up to date! Here are just a few garden trends we expect to see in spring next year. Colour Coordinated Purples with pinks, yellows with oranges, whites with green.
Abeliophyllum distichum also called White Forsythia is more refined than traditional yellow Forsythia to which it is distantly related, both being part of the Olive family.
These photos are from Magdalen College Oxford University.
Greens are vibrant in your garden during spring and with careful plant selection good foliage can be grown throughout the seasons.
The two best complimentary colours are Red and Green. There are many ways this is demonstrated in the spring garden and they will be sure to draw compliments. The Peonies are just opening under a bit of shelter and shade.
Forsythia is a genus of spring flowering shrubs that burst into bloom in early March before their leaves appear. However, they are best known by their common name of yellowbells. Yellowbells (Forsythia x intermedia) are deciduous, mounding shrubs that can grow as large as 10 feet tall by 10 feet wide. Many newer mid-sized cultivars may grow to 5 feet tall by 6 feet wide, yet some recent releases only grow to 1½ by 3 feet at maturity. These smaller cultivars are perfect as accent plants in cottage style, perennial landscapes, and the faster growing, larger cultivars make excellent, impervious hedges. They are deer resistant, make nice nesting sites for songbirds, are easy to grow, and require little maintenance.
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In springtime, the deciduous woodlands around us are beginning to awaken as the delicate flowers of spring ephemerals pierce the blanket of leaf litter. Most of these woodland plants are found in areas with rich, humusy soil and layer of deep leaf litter; they flower when the leaves are off the trees and light reaches the forest floor in spring. These diminutive plants are beautiful, but beyond this, they provide critical support for newly emerging spring bees. As temperatures warm, native solitary bees visit bloodroot, trout lily, spring beauty, Virginia bluebells, and other spring flowers to collect pollen or sip nectar. Some of these bees have a close or exclusive relationship with specific flowers, a fact recognized in their names: trout lily bee (Andrena erythronii) or the spring beauty bee(Andrena erigeniae). Trout lily bees visit more than just trout lily, but the latter relies exclusively on the pink pollen provided by spring beauty to provision their nests. However, many other bees visit this spring beauty too. In fact, 58 species of bees have been reported as visitors to this tiny pink flower. Similarly, bloodroot, trout lilies, and Virginia bluebells are visited by a diversity of bees, including bumblebees (Bombus spp.), little carpenter bees (Ceratina spp.), halictid bees (Halictus spp., Lasioglossum spp.), and mason bees (Osmia spp.). Clearly, these spring ephemerals are of considerable importance to the survival of many spring bee species, a fact we rarely consider when we admire their flowers.
March brings springtime, and with the warmer temperatures, vibrant colors in the landscape like the lawn. Many lawns in South Carolina are warm season, like bermudagrass, centipedegrass, and zoysiagrass, which will start to transition from a tannish-brown color to a new green color. But while we may get excited when the grass starts to green-up again in the spring, there are some instances where springtime diseases can create patches of persistent off-color turf.
Every walk in the woods is a treasure hunt as spring ephemerals begin to break through the soil surface. I am almost positive that this trout lily was not up yesterday, but today it is in full flower in the South Carolina Botanical Garden. Notice the beautifully mottled foliage, reminiscent of a trout’s belly. In South Carolina, trout lilies begin to emerge in early to mid-February when leaves are off the trees. Their range is wide in eastern North America, from Labrador in the north to Georgia in the south and as far west as Mississippi.
Spring has officially sprung here in South Carolina. While we are all familiar with the term “spring cleaning” when it comes to our homes, there is another aspect of our lives that could use some decluttering: our eating habits. By implementing these simple nutrition tips, we not only improve our health but also improve the environment and our communities.