While working on a new book and deciding which native plants to profile, I was confronted with one of the frustrating ironies of native plant gardening: numerous species of native plants currently not available for sale at nurseries would be grown by gardeners if they were commercially available, but nurseries aren’t growing them due, in part, to a perceived lack of demand!
It’s more complicated than that, for sure--especially the economics of growing native woodland plants that might take years before they are mature enough for nurseries to sell…
But I’ve started to think of these native species as “ghost plants.” They are memories that haunt me, spirits of what could be!
In the book Sheila Colla and I have coming out this spring, we included a list (rather than profiles) of some of these plants with a challenge to gardeners: ask for them at nurseries, urge nurseries to propagate them and to ethically source local seed, in order to expand the availability of diverse species that will grow our gardens as biodiverse habitats of ecological functioning.
Below are a few of the (Ontario) native plants that are very difficult (if not impossible) to find for sale at nurseries, but that would be fabulous additions to gardens and, I’m sure, snapped up by gardeners if they were commercially available. (I’ll be profiling these species in more detail in future posts and also adding to this list. As well, a future post will be about some of the specialty native plant nurseries that sell hard-to-find species.)
NATIVE WILDLFLOWERS:
Hooked agrimony (Agrimonia gryposepala)
Canada garlic (Allium canadense)
White camas (Anticlea elegans)
Cream-flowered rock cress, a.k.a. slender rock cress (Arabis pycnocarpa var. pycnocarpa)
Green dragon (Arisaema dracontium)
Hairy wood mint (Blephilia hirsuta)
Strawberry-bite (Blitum capitatum)
Wild hyacinth (Camassia scilloides)
Purple cress (Cardamine douglassi)
Rock harlequin (Capnoides sempervirens)
Harbinger-of-spring (Erigenia bulbosa)
White trout lily (Erythronium albidum)
Slender fragrant goldenrod (Euthamia caroliniana)
Wild licorice (Galium circaezans)
Stiff gentian (Gentianella quinquefolia)
Fringed gentian (Gentianopsis crinita)
Wild licorice (Glycyrrhiza lepidota)
Appendaged waterleaf (Hydrophyllum appendiculatum)
Eastern yellow stargrass (Hypoxis hirsuta)
Dwarf lake iris (Iris lacustris)
Wood nettle (Laportea canadensis)
Seedbox (Ludwigia alternifolia)
Winged loosestrife (Lythrum alatum)
Three-leaved Solomon’s seal (Maianthemum trifolium)
Biennial gaura (Oenothera gaura)
Yellow wood-sorrel (Oxalis stricta)
Ditch stonecrop (Penthorum sedoides)
Virginia smartweed (Persicaria vriginiana)
Dwarf Canadian primrose (Primula mistassinica)
Lizard’s tail (Saururus cernuus)
Yellow pimpernel (Taenidia integerrima)
Rue anemone (Thalictrum thalictroides)
Painted trillium (Trillium undulatum)
White vervain (Verbena urticifolia)
NATIVE SHRUBS:
Eastern burning bush (Euonymus atropurpureus)
Smooth blackberry (Rubus canadensis)
NATIVE GRASSES:
Poverty oat grass (Danthonia spicata)
Tufted lovegrass (Eragrostis pectinacea var. pectinacean)
Purple lovegrass (Eragrostis spectabilis)