We, gardeners, are human. We want to sway in the hammock when hot days come and watch the garden bloom.
No flowers are better suited to this resistance to work than the wildflowers that arrive at their peak of beauty in the 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 the earth pours forth the fruits of its season of preparation to ensure growth and green for future generations of plants and man.
The problem of using wildflowers for the summer garden is mainly one of selecting those which delight you most and which fit the conditions you have for them.
Wildflowers exist for every sunny situation: rocks, bogs, brook-sides, meadows, and open fields.
Wildflowers For Every Location
Yellow silken blooms of prickly pear bring glory to rocks in July. No one should wish for more beauty when planted in the company of three-leaved cinquefoil, bearberry, hay-scented fern, poppy mallows, and low penstemons (from the West).
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 soil fertility.
A clayey field will wave with a blazing lavender star. A boggy spot can be flushed 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 flowers 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 hold rich gold, purple, and red. Full-blown greens of summer grasses and leaves surround them. In mid-August, our fields and roadsides rival the most magnificent flower display Byer has seen anywhere.
It is optional to have a great expanse of the garden to grow field flowers. They can be used to make sunny borders, edge a path, and bring color to a corner or along a fence. My garden borders a section of lawn and transitions into the field beyond.
The Least Demanding Plant
With few exceptions, these flowers, whose native home is the sunny open field, are perennials and, once planted, come up and increase every year. In addition, they are the least demanding plants of special soils, preferring garden loam on the compact side.
Too rich soil is harmful. Rich soil will encourage them to read’ for the sky so that wands of b]azing 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 big flower heads.
Composite Flowers
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 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, a daisy, or a sunflower are not petals at all but are individual flowers, usually infertile-like drones, modified to resemble beautiful 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.
Summer Flowers
Most of these summer flowers efficiently make ninny seeds with ingenious dispersal devices. 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 crowd each other out or are crowded 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.
In An Open Field Garden
If your garden is an 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 that 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 your summer wildflower garden is in a smaller space. It can be satisfying, but fewer plants will be more effective here.
Those who will not throw the garden out of proportion should be 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 1’ or 2’ feet until late July. They will bloom regularly in August but on bushier, lower plants.
All the flowers pictured in the basket on page 24 were gathered from my garden in July.
They are the following:
- White spires of cohosh
- Pink meadowsweet
- Lilac blazing star blend
- Orange meadow
- American Turk’s-cap lilies
- Red-orange butterfly weed
- Black-eyed Susan
- Lavender Stokes aster
- Red Oswego tea
- Wineberry
- Cat-tails
- Ferns
- Grasses
Many more are joined in August, including the great variety of asters, purple to white, plumes of goldenrod, deep purple ironweed, and the red cardinal flower, which will grow in the sun and shade if there is moisture. Many of these favorites have been raised from seed.
Gathered Seeds In Fall
Seed should be gathered in the fall and sown out-of-doors in open, prepared ground or a seedbed of garden loam, then covered with burlap for the winter. This keeps the seeds from washing away, but the burlap should be removed in spring before germinating.
The young plants can be cared for like perennials, thinned if necessary, and transplanted in the fall or early the following spring to their permanent places. Some blooms can be expected in the second summer.
Set the small plants in groups for mutual protection or plant them out in rows until common sense says they can take care of themselves in competition with other plants in their environment.
Most of these plants are perennials, so the clumps will increase over the years and must be divided when they become too large for your garden.
Many self-sow, like the biennial 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 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 wildflowers of the fields will survive drought but bloom better if they are occasionally soaked during dry spells.
Keep in touch with the soil under the mulch and water only when it feels dry. Too much water will develop leggy plants out of proportion.
When The Last Aster Fades
As the last aster fades in October, it is time to lift clumps that need to be divided for next summer’s garden. Although summer-flowering plants also can be divided in the spring.
However, if plants are to be purchased from a distant nursery, 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 decay—a complete loss.
In my garden, I prefer 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 wildflowers.
The summer-blooming wildflower garden does not require additional mulching for winter as the early woodland garden does. But it is well to water all wildflowers before winter sets in; evergreen boughs are desirable for protective cover.
44659 by Helen S. Hull