Saturday, 14 June 2025
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Designed for Nature Garden Tour
Saturday, 14 June 2025
It was in 2019 that I saw a notice in the Tohickon (Pennsylvania) garden club newsletter that there would be a Designed for Nature garden tour. Organized by the Woman's National Farm & Garden Association, Bucks Branch, in partnership with Bowman's Hill Wildflower preserve, the tour has a focus on the use of native plants in local residential gardens. Of course I opted in. That was then, this is now. Five or six different gardens every year, mostly urban. Open from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., customize the itinerary on your own. There was a year off during the covid 19 closures. Now I go with a friend. We have been doing this for, let me think, four years. So it has become a tradition. He drives. I make our picnic lunch.
Weather has been wet. That's also the forecast for today. We discussed it, decided to check on Thursday, decide on Friday. Yes. No. Maybe. What the heck, we'll go and if it is too wet we'll bail. Oops, bad choice of word. So on Friday evening I packed lunch.
I really like these containers. Here we have a hard boiled egg, cut in 6 small wedges.
The larger compartment has tuna macaroni salad with small diced carrot pieces, cooked,
green peas, and sliced black olives, dressed with mayonnaise. I also packed up cherries,
and a couple of chocolate chip cookies I baked a day ago. Two bottles of water. Enough.
This morning is - choose one - overcast, drizzling, raining. We set off for Doylestown, Pennsylvania. It's about an hour away. Five minutes early, and people are still setting up. Rather than stand around we decide to set for the next garden on our list. Time and weather permitting we might double back. But right now we're moving on to a different garden. And another, and another.
A planting bed at the mailbox, out by the street, is brimming with flowers. Off to the left I see
a white prairie cone flower, a cultivar of Echinacea purpurea. There's some orange butterfly weed,
Asclepias tuberosa, and lots yellow coreopsis. A floriferous stop for pollinators. And mail carriers.
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Prairie cone flower, Echinacea purpurea, is popular in generalist perennial gardens also.
Garden centers tend to offer cultivars rather than the straight species. Do pollinators care?
Spiderwort, Tradescantia virginiana, is a native plant with a fascinating possibility
as a biosensor radiation detection device, first trialed in Japan in 1974 as reported here.
copyright WPWoodall, all rights reserved
Here's an excellent image my friend took of milkweed, Asclepias syriaca, at the head of the driveway.
Carried in clusters of 30 or more, the flowers of milkweeds are pentamerous, with five petals, five sepals.
You might want to selective about which native plants you should grow. For example if I tell you
it grows well in the shade, has excellent fall color, and birds eat its berries - that all sounds good.
Across the street from one of the tour gardens. Looks attractive as a self planted ground cover.
Native, check. But grow it . . . I think not. Why? It is Toxicodendron radicans, aka poison ivy.
Others, though, offer interesting possibilities. Consider sensitive fern, Onoclea sensibilis. It is
dimorphic, with strikingly different sterile and fertile fronds.A running fern, quickly spreading.
I trialed some in a pot, where it made a pleasingly tropical looking summer display. Died back
in winter, of course. But then "woke up" the following spring and again gave me a healthy show.
There's always a useful adjunct to the garden tour, a native plant sale and raffle held at one of the gardens.
You go home with plant(s) while supporting WNF&GA education, Delaware Valley University scholarship,
and outreach all at the same time. What a feel-good way to feel positive about buying plants. Which we do!
The weather is not really terrible, just yet. But it is fast approaching get out the umbrellas. We're making rather quick visits through the gardens and a more thorough examination of just one.
There is a path of sizeable flagstones towards the registration table at the house,
fortunately under an overhang. What's that on the retaining wall to the left?
A magnificent colorful display of Mexican tiles. Did I hear someone mention it was done
by the homeowner and his son . . . maybe. And the pot of petunias is harmonious.
The professionally designed landscape has several purposes: it supports wildlife, including
butterflies from larval to adult. Pragmatically, there is water management. The property slopes
down from the road. It used to become inundated in moderate rainfall. And it is attractive.
Rock ponds have solved the problem, along with underground pipes and water loving plants.
The quite tall perennial plants in the background of the previous image are a species of Silphium.
Native to the prairies of the Midwest, they'll soon have yellow daisy-like flowers. We saw them
in other of the gardens we visited today too. Lovely plants if you have the space for them to grow.
Woodland plants, native or exotic, flower early, before trees leaf out to shade them from the sun.
Grassland plants such as grow in meadow and prairie are summer flowering when the days are longer
and the overhead sun is stronger than the low angle of early spring. In another of the gardens I saw
gayfeather, Liatris spicata,, heavily in bud. Given some time, not much, they will be spectacular.
Not astilbe but rather goat's beard, Aruncus dioicus. Likes wet soil and shade. Perfect for this
garden. And the plastic pipe off to the side? The one going all the way up to the top of the
chimney with a sort of flying saucer device by the ground? It's a radon mitigation system.
Grow native plants, support wildlife habitats, food and shelter for birds and insects.
Use organic practices while avoiding herbicides and lawn chemicals that seep into water.
It is now raining with more enthusiasm. We eat our lunch in the car, then drive back across the Delaware River. There's always next year to look forward to, different gardens and - hopefully - better weather. But we really enjoyed our time visiting today's gardens designed for nature.
If you have any comments or questions, you can e-mail me: jgglatt@gmail.com
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