Over the years, we’ve been fostering mostly native plant species in our front and back yards, and on a lovely autumn day we decided to inventory them.
With a pencil, paper, and a great plant identification app to verify identities, we started the list. We wrote the names of every perennial species we saw, as well as others that bloomed in spring and were now nowhere to be found. We included the invasive and non-native plants on our list.
Some of these plants were already growing here when I moved in; others were brought from gardening friends who dug them up from their own yards to share. Others were purchased at local native plant sales. Others, we dug up ourselves.
The garden transfers are fun, because you never know what other plants might be lurking in the soil that inadvertently got dug by the unassuming gardener. The blue mist flower is one example. It likely came from one of the many plants my sister dug from her garden and placed in various pots for us to plant in our space.
This summer, we spotted a small cluster of soft, blue blooms atop a foot-tall stalk. The fluffy edges of the blooms give it a “misty” appearance, and it often blooms into early November, offering food for the last of the bees and butterflies. It grows in wet meadows and ditches, and now a little depression in our yard.
Even though the blue mistflower is native to the eastern United States, it can be invasive, according to the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center. We have only one plant this year. My sister has loads. We will watch to see what happens in the coming summers, but for now it’s a welcome plant on our list, and one that appeared on its own.
This time of year, especially with the lack of rain, ferns tend to yellow or shrivel. But we have one species, the spinulose wood fern, looking beautiful, among the hapless ostrich and lady ferns. My husband tells me he dug that fern up somewhere and planted it in our yard, but until the inventory, we had forgotten about it.
Research revealed this species does not do well in clay soil, which we have, so let’s hope it beats the odds, turns golden yellow as fall progresses and rises as fiddleheads from the soil next spring.
Gardeners try to place plants in the best growing conditions, whether they require sun, shade, moisture, or other conditions. But sometimes a plant defies us, by either growing where we didn’t think it would, or not liking what we thought was a perfect spot.
We have a host of trees, shrubs and plants with fun names like calico aster, golden Alexander, nannyberry, bottlebrush grass, Joe-Pye weed, Ohio buckeye (planted by a squirrel), bloodroot (given to me by a neighbor), that are all native. But we also found some like monkey grass, non-native and invasive. As long as it behaves itself, it will stay.
My sister gives us several “stick tree” freebies from a local nursery each year. We set cages around them to deter hungry rabbits in winter. Now, some are growing quite nicely, including the American plum, which this summer grew to be almost as tall as I am.
We also have two moss species. One is silvergreen bryum moss. It grows worldwide and easily invades sidewalk cracks. Moss gardeners love it. We do, too. The other, called baby tooth moss, is also ubiquitous. Birds including chickadees and waxwings will use it to build or line their nests. It’s even found at salamander nests. I’ll be watching next spring to see if our chickadees secure some mosses to build a nest.
We have a 15-foot-tall shagbark hickory, and thought we had another much smaller one nearby, until we realized my sister gave it to us, and it is a butternut or white walnut. The terminal bud on the butternut is a sulphur-yellow color, a good identification clue. Unfortunately this species has declined at least 50% since the 1960s due to a lethal fungal disease introduced from Asia.
While we walked the yard, spritely American goldfinches chattered and tinkled landing in trees and shrubs and sipping water from homemade bird baths. A red-bellied woodpecker complained from a nearby tree, and a chipmunk scolded.
Fall is a good time to do an inventory because some flowers are still blooming, and those that are past their prime still can be identified by leaf shape and structure, among other attributes. But some of our plants are completely gone this time of year. We recall the Virginia bluebells blooming around a large Norway spruce in April in our front yard. Their seeds and rhizomes are now beneath the soil, waiting for next spring.
We also remember prairie trillium, trout lily and spring beauty, some of our beautiful spring ephemerals, all lying in some format beneath the soil. They get counted, too. Thinking of those plants, I retreat to March and early April, a time that promises future delights in the garden.
The inventory revealed at least 150 species of plants in our small yard. The list now compels me to spend snowy winter days researching these plants to learn more about the flora that lives in the yard.
Sheryl DeVore has worked as a full-time and freelance reporter, editor and photographer for the Chicago Tribune and its subsidiaries. She’s the author of several books on nature and the environment. Send story ideas and thoughts to sheryldevorewriter@gmail.com.