Squeezing in native plants

When I read Douglas Tallamy’s book Bringing Nature Home, I was inspired to add native plants to my garden to support native insects. There was just one problem. My garden was already full.

    As a gardening beginner, I chose plants without thinking about their environmental role. By planting what I liked and could get to grow and bloom in my yard, I ended up with a mix of natives and imports. I’m fond of the nonnatives that have settled in successfully, and I had no intention of booting them out.

Doublefile viturnum isn't a native, but I love it

    Instead, I started looking for places to shoehorn in some new plants. Sometimes I could open new areas to cultivation, as by subtracting lawn or removing colonizers such as tawny daylily (Hemerocallis fulva) that didn’t appeal to me. 

Tawny daylily, native to Asia, pops up everywhere-photo A. Barra

More often, opportunities arose when something I’d planted didn’t make it. 

    One chance to add sun-loving natives came when we took down a white-flowered redbud (Cercis canadensis f. alba) that had become ungainly. Daylilies I’d planted nearby when the tree was small had stopped blooming as it cast more shade. Without the tree, they took heart and sent out flowers the next summer. Around them there was space for threadleaf coreopsis, or tickseed (Coreopsis verticillata), which has gradually spread along 10 feet of border, weaving around the perennials and low shrubs in the bed. 

Native threadleaf coreopsis coexists happily with daylilies

The tickseed is a native that draws insects to the area. Behind it, I scattered seeds of common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca). My reason for introducing this possibly aggressive spreader was to attract monarch butterflies, which need milkweed leaves to feed their caterpillars.

I hope monarchs will lay eggs on this common milkweed

    When I planted some dwarf trees around a garden pond, I chose Colorado blue spruces (Picea pungens) for two of the corners. Native to Massachusetts? Well, no, but they’re native to North America, and they provide shelter for moths and butterflies during the summer. I’ve since learned to check a plant’s native range more carefully.

Blue spruce fits in nicely around the pond

    Several native flowers moved in when I converted half of the vegetable garden that was too shady to produce food into an insectary bed, a pollinator garden that also offers benefits for beneficial insects and native leaf-eaters. There I can grow native perennials that are comfortable with part shade. Two kinds of milkweed (Asclepias incarnata and A. tuberosa), oxeye sunflower (Heliopsis helianthoides), garden phlox (Phlox paniculata), black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), and purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) mix with pollinator-friendly annuals not native to New England, such as zinnias (Zinnia elegans), sweet alyssum (Lobularia maritima) and cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus).

Insectary plants offer food and shelter for native insects

    A new perennial bed off the back deck offered lots of space for sun-loving natives. That’s a story for another day. Meanwhile, the sad decision to cut down our hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis), native evergreens that were under attack from a nonnative insect, opened up a back corner of the yard. I’m adding native shrubs and perennials there, seeing which ones will take hold with a minimum of watering. That may develop into the garden’s most authentic New England thicket.

Allegheny spurge, a native pachysandra, getting a foothold at the back of the yard