Category Archives: Grow Native Massachusetts

RESPECT YOUR ELDERS!

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Red elderberry, Sambucus racemosa, flower buds

Native red elderberry plant, Sambucus racemosa, showing off its flower buds in the Garden-911 display garden in North Easton, MA. WARNING: Red elderberry fruit, leaves, stems, flowers, roots and other tissue are known to be toxic when taken internally without sufficient preparation. Carol Lundeen and Garden-911 assume no liability if you choose to eat or allow others to eat any part of the plant.

Walking the Garden-911 display garden today, these red elderberry flower buds caught my eye. With the color of deep purple lilacs, these native Sambucus racemosa flower buds, combined with their emerging compound leaves, put a smile on my face and took my mind off everything for a few minutes. Gardens, especially native plant gardens, have long been known to be restorative. If you’re staying at home to ride out the coronavirus, it may be a great time to pause to enjoy spring emerging in your landscape – even if it’s just weeds emerging in last year’s containers, or up through the cracks in a sidewalk.

DESIGN AND CULTIVATION When designing with elderberry, keep in mind that they prefer, and will spread and fruit most robustly, in a sunny exposure. Red elderberry is found on a wide variety of soils but favors deeper, loamy sands and silts and nutrient rich sites with good drainage, ample moisture and a pH of 5.0 to 8.0. It’s best to plant at least two genetically diverse individuals. Before you purchase a plant, always inquire as to how it was grown. Even though you’re purchasing a native plant, it may have been grown in a conventional nursery that uses conventional propagation methods like vegetative cloning, where all plants are genetically identical. It’s best to find a nursery that sells sustainably grown specimens. Grow Native Massachusetts has a terrific resource list of nurseries they recommend.

The dense roots and rhizomes of red elderberry make it useful for soil stabilization and erosion control on moist sites including streambanks. It provides fair to good food and cover for birds plus small and large mammals. Hummingbirds collect nectar from the flowers. The fruit is high in ascorbic acid. Stems, bark, leaves and roots contain cyanide-producing toxins but berries may be consumed as jelly or wine after cooking. This versatile plant can also be used to make dye, insecticide, medicine, and musical instruments. The colorful fruit attracts birds and several cultivars have been developed for ornamental applications.

NATIVE PLANT GEEK INFO Other scientific names include Sambucus callicarpa, Sambucus microbotrys, Sambucus pubens, Sambucus pubens. var. arborescens, Sambucus racemosa var. racemosa, Sambucus racemosa ssp. pubens and Sambucus racemosa var. pubens. Alternate common names include scarlet elder, stinking elderberry, stinking elder, red-berried elder, bunchberry elder, and red elder.

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GROW NATIVE MA ANNUAL PLANT SALE – JOIN ME JUNE 1st!

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Help Massachusetts communities and wildlife thrive by joining me at the annual Grow Native Massachusetts Plant Sale. You’ll find over 2,000 plants covering 120 varieties, and I (and other experts) can help you make smart selections for the particular conditions of your planting area. Just look for me in a blue volunteer apron from 8-11. Shop early for best selection.

From 9-2:30 at the UMass Waltham Field Station at 240 Beaver Street, Waltham 02452, you may find:

  • Perennials sorted by sun, shade and part-shade, and all types of soil conditions
  • A large selection of evergreen and deciduous ferns
  • Grasses and sedges, both cool and warm season
  • Trees and shrubs at small sizes so you can take home in your car. Native trees and shrubs do the most to increase biodiversity and to enhance the wildlife value of your landscapes.

AND new for this year: sweet goldenrod (Solidago odora), bluestem goldenrod (Solidago caesia) and spotted beebalm (Monarda punctata)—custom grown just for this sale, as these are top native herbaceous plants for supporting the entire life cycles of our butterfly and moth pollinator friends, and a whole lot of bees’, too.

All plants are native to the eastern United States—the majority indigenous to New England

Learn more: https://www.grownativemass.org/programs/plantsale
Download a list of the species available at the 2019 Native Plant Sale

 

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GROW NATIVE MA HOSTS INTERNATIONAL AWARD WINNING LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT MATTHEW CUNNINGHAM

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Landscape architect Matthew Cunningham presented at Evenings with Experts, co-sponsored by Grow Native Massachusetts and the Boston Society of Landscape Architects.

International award winning landscape architect Matthew Cunningham presented at Evenings with Experts, on April 4th. Co-sponsored by Grow Native Massachusetts and the Boston Society of Landscape Architects, his design bring a sense of nature to his clients’ homes, creating a sense of privacy and wildness through the use of hard-working, beautiful native plants.

Last night, international award winning landscape architect Matthew Cunningham presented Revealing a Sense of Place at Grow Native Massachusetts’ Evenings with Experts talk at the Cambridge Public Library. The humble, approachable Matthew presented before-and-after profiles of several design projects he’s taken on, from a rocky, tide-swept cove in Maine to suburban West Newton and Brookline. In all cases, he borrowed concepts from nature, incorporating native plant communities into his designs, creating a sense of privacy and wildness for his clients.

The most thrilling part for me was his satellite photo of Cambridge, MA pointing out his first client there. The next slide showed that the neighbors have caught on, and now his clients are dotted all over town, creating a growing quilt of properties that support wildlife and pollinators, manage and filter rain water, and provide numerous other ecosystem services that only native plants can provide…including services for clients who disdain tree huggers and care primarily for aesthetics.

Keeping up with the Joneses now means people are investing in native plants, and it turns out that native plants don’t make a mess in your yard. They actually create a robust landscape system that hums on its own. This is the kind of news that inspires and delights me, and we could all use good news these days.

 

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LESSONS LEARNED WHEN FIELD BOTANY MEETS DESIGN – MARCH 7

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Uli Lorimer, Curator of the Native Flora Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Uli Lorimer, Curator of the Native Flora Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, will present Lessons Learned When Field Botany Meets Design at Grow Native Massachusetts’ Evenings with Experts lecture series at the Cambridge Public Library, Wednesday March 7 from 7:00 – 8:30 pm.

Evenings with Experts | Uli Lorimer | March 7 | Grow Native Massachusetts | Cambridge Public Library

Uli Lorimer, Curator of the Native Flora Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Ecologically attuned designers are increasingly looking to nature for inspiration in the design of managed landscapes. But connecting field botany to horticulture is complex, and insights gained from observations in the wild don’t always translate directly into a cultivated garden.

Uli will use the recently expanded native flora garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a cultivated pine barrens and coastal plain grassland, as a case study— sharing lessons learned along the way as the project evolved from a concept into a dynamic, living landscape. Good design allows for change and succession to occur, and flexibility in design intent is a valuable strategy because things do not always work out as planned.

Uli Lorimer has been the Curator of Native Flora at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden Garden for over a decade. He was instrumental in the expansion of the Garden’s native plant collection, using only material sourced from the wild and grown from seed. As Field Chair at BBG, he coordinates fieldwork with regional botanists and leads botanical expeditions for naturalists and horticulturists.
This lecture is co-sponsored by Mount Auburn Cemetery

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THE BEAUTIFUL ADAPTATIONS OF NATIVE PLANTS EVENT FEB 7th

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Eager to learn more about native plants? Join Grow Native Massachusetts‘ Evenings with Experts this winter! 

This free public lecture series is held at the Cambridge Public Library on the first Wednesday of each month, from February through May from 7:00 — 8:30 pm.

On February 7, Dan Segal, owner of The Plantsmen Nursery, will present The Beautiful Adaptations of Native Plants: Inviting the Wild into our Gardens.

Native plants have evolved a broad array of adaptations in the wild, yielding not only the ornamental features embraced in horticulture but many fascinating mechanisms for survival. Dan will take us beyond ‘pretty’ plant features to explore the origins of these adaptive traits, and the critical importance of regional variation. This insight helps us to select plants that are genuinely suited to our landscapes.  He will also compare and contrast large-scale nursery production that favors the cloning of cultivars, with small-scale nursery propagation that favors seed-grown straight species.  To know and source native plants effectively, understanding their propagation can be just as important as species selection.

As the owner of The Plantsmen Nursery, Dan Segal specializes in native plants, local seed collection, and natural landscaping. Dan has collected and propagated over 1,000 species of native plants in his three decades of work as a nurseryman, giving him great insight into the fascinating variety of adaptations that plants have evolved to survive. His nursery is in Ithaca, NY, where founded the Ithaca Native Plant Symposium in 2009.

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