Garden Blogger's Bloom Day At Owl's Hill

It was a marvelous golden day to be in the garden and if I couldn't spend time in my own, then spending time at Owl's Hill with a group of nature lovers was the second best thing that could happen.

Owl's Hill is a 160 acre nature sanctuary and their mission is conservation, restoration, research, and species protection. (here and here) Set among the rolling hills of Williamson County, on land that was heavily farmed for hundreds of years, Owl's Hill founders set about almost two decades ago to restore the land to a natural habitat.

There are enormous 300-year-old trees, vestiges of the great eastern deciduous forest that once covered Tennessee, among the pioneer trees, seasonal wildflowers and ponds and wetlands. Owl's Hill is home to more than a dozen amphibian species, 125 species of birds and almost all the mammals found in Middle Tennessee.

It is also the site of my Tennessee Master Naturalist classes...Lucky me, I was accepted into the second training session and over the next ten months the class lessons will be touching upon the major components of Tennessee's natural biological systems.

You couldn't ask for a better place to study nature.

Gray Hairstreak dropping by to hear instructor Steve Murphree

Saturday was bug day! To be accurate, it was pollinators, predators, pests and parasitoids day!  Steve Murphree, a Belmont University professor gave an excellent and informative talk and then we headed out to the garden of native plants.

Verbesina virginica and nectaring friends

After all, that's where all the flowering plants and critter action can be found.

So join me in a Bloom Day celebration of a few of the marvelous flowers in bloom at Owl's Hill (a few of the critters we saw, too) and don't forget to stop by May Dreams Gardens and take the Mr Linky magic carpet ride to more gardens than you can imagine seeing in one day!

Verbesina alternifolia was blooming all over the place! When I say blooming all over the place, I mean it was a major player along the pond where it has the moist soil it prefers.

More often known as 'Wingstem', it was marvelous and golden against the blue skies. I don't know about you, but, I have a special place in my heart for rough and tumble wildflowers and these rough looking golden flowers really fit the bill!

Also in bloom is a close relative, Verbesina virginica.  It's another of the rough and tumble wildflowers that has captured my heart! It's known as 'Frostweed' because of the unique frost flowers that develops on cool mornings (Have You Seen The Frost Flowers and Frost Flowers Blooming the Garden), but, there's more to these beauties. They are true pollinator magnets.

'Frostweed' always has pollinator visitors (I can save seeds for you)

They bloom for an extraordinarily long time and attract every pollen and nectar seeking moth, skipper, soldier beetle, honey bee or bumble bee.  That's a lot to get from a flower. Don't you agree?

It's a host plant for one of my favorite butterfly, the Silvery Checkerspot

If your heart is open to rough and tumble wildflowers, I have another flower to share! This one may surprise you, although, not my good friend Frances of Fairegarden...She feels the same way about them.

Thistles were making a beautiful and dramatic statement in the wilder places at Owl's Hill.

Possibly Circium muticum/Swamp thistle

They were stunning in the sunlight and utterly and completely charming to look at.

Yes, I did use stunning and charming to describe thistles!

They were. I fell for their good looks when I saw them standing tall among a field of Solidago, Verbesina, Asclepias and Vernonia. I am guessing they might be Circium muticum, a biennial that grows in moist fields. But, the name matters not, their real charm required an up close and personal look into their beautiful rose pink flower faces.

They were lovely and the flower heads were quite soft, and bees, beetles, skippers and other critters crawled in, on and around with ease.

I will suggest that if you want to get close, that you be careful where you hold on to the stem,  they are thistles after all.

xxoogail

PS If you live in Middle Tennessee, call Owl's Hill to make an appointment to stop by and see the wildflowers and the owls!  Yes, they have owls!

Gail Eichelberger is a gardener and therapist in Middle Tennessee. She loves wildflowers and native plants and thoroughly enjoys writing about the ones she grows at Clay and Limestone. She reminds all that the words and images are the property of the author and cannot be used without written permission.

Wildflower Wednesday~Nothing To Sneeze About

Helenium autumnale or Common Sneezeweed

There's way too much laughing at the gardener already about this post! I've been bamboozled by a misidentified plant. A little voice said~"Check this plant out before you post!" I listen to those little voices and verified. Good thing or my wildflower loving face would be red! I so wanted to share my big find of the summer, which wasn't a big find after all!

Last winter I shared Frostweed in a post, Have You Seen The Frost Flowers. Ever since I discovered that White Crownbeard has a yellow flowered cousin, v alternifolia, I've been on the lookout for it. I thought I found it earlier this spring at my favorite native plant nursery. Labels can be wrong! Never, ever, ever make assumptions! I was lead astray by those winged stems! Sneezeweed has winged stems, too.

Winged stems on Helen's Flower

As soon as the flower opened, I knew they were Helen's Flower, Helenium autumnale, an entirely different plant. That's not to say that sneezeweed isn't a delightful flower. It really is~

Just look at the lovely yellow face~ How could you find fault with a sweet smiling flower, that's attractive to honeybees, Minor bees, bumble bees, Leaf Cutting bees, wasps, butterflies, bee flies and some beetles. And, for all you gardeners troubled by dear deer~ It's deer proof~ all parts of it being poisonous, so deer aren't supposed to browse it!

Look at that sweet face

I'm hopeful that sneezeweed will find a place among the rough and tumble wildflowers that make their home at Clay and Limestone. I am charmed by this member of the sunflower family with its sweet daisy flowers with toothed drooping rays and that large central disk. They prefer a moist, rich soil, but they've survived all summer here with inconsistent rain and very high temperatures. Almost any of us can grow Sneezeweed~it's native to most of North America~except Alaska. As a native plant lover I want to thank the Europeans for bringing Sneezeweed to our attention. Like many of our most wonderful native plants, Sneezeweed was unknown or ignored until we started seeing them in their gardens.

They're planted in the sunniest spots I have with correopsis, asters, salvia azurea and Tennessee Coneflower. The stems are floppy and next year I'll cut them back in early July~They'll be bushier and look neater. They've just opened, so I'll dead head to keep them blooming, but, leave a few flowers to see if they will reseed. I think they've bloom till frost~just in time for the native ex-asters. Won't they look good together!

One other thing, Helenium autumnale is named sneezeweed because the leaves were dried and made into a snuff by native Americans to induce sneezing to treat a cold, not because they cause hay fever. Sneezeweed is insect pollinated and no pollen is released into the air.

In the meantime, Verbesina alternifolia is going back on the list. Here's what it looks like~

Wingstem

Thanks for stopping by to celebrate Wildflower Wednesday. It's all about sharing wildflowers/native plants no matter where you garden in the blogasphere. It doesn't matter if we sometimes show the same plants. How they grow and thrive in your garden is what matters most.

I hope you join the celebration..It's always the fourth Wednesday of the month!


Gail