Midwest

Merry Bells. One of our favorite of the Midwest and Eastern woodland wildflowers. Rich gold pendant flowers dangling like earrings on a woman of some serious substance. Combines beautifully with upper crust plants such as Cardiocrinums and Arisaemas yet hangs comfortably with box store Hostas. These are divisions from our stock plants.

A graceful Trillium native from Minnesota to Alabama and which has been a very good plant in our garden. White flowers in April above three broad green leaves and can be quite robust getting up to 2 feet tall and making multiple stems per bulb. And the darned thing is seeding itself around in the garden - lucky us! Our own slow propagations - not wild collected.

Collected by the late Don Jacobs from an especially robust population at the eastern extension of its range in in the Arbuckle Mountains of Oklahoma. This eastern extension our native Western Stream Orchid will soon form a colony of flowering stems with small orange-yellow-brown flowers. Moist to wet rich soil - it's easy!

One of the finest Trilliums for foliage and flower in its best forms. This Midwestern native has sessile or stemless flowers of a brownish maroon. Easy to please in the garden.

Oh the Ozarks, packed with botanical curiosities and endemic gems like our own little version of a Yunnanese mountain range. From this legendary producer of such smash hits as Hamamelis vernalis comes yet another hit single, the ozark trillium. A botanist's beauty, in other words a green flower, but truly one of the best if you, like us, are into that sort of thing. Classic trillium form with delicately curved acid green petals painted a deep maroon at the base. Like other trilliums hailing from East of the rockies these appreciate a pleasant woodland setting and can put up with alkaline clay soils.

This is from a collection of ours from North Dakota where its glaucous-green leaves looked most appealing. Small starry white flowers in May and June and the subsequent fruit is most appealing - to us anyway - when immature as the round green "peas" are decked out in dark stripes. This will spread a foot or so a year and you can eat the new shoots to keep it in check.

Midwestern native Hepatica whose name has been changed to Anemone acutiloba or some prefer Anemone nobilis var. acuta. We cling to Hepatica, kicking and screaming. These are from seed from the unparalleled collection at Ashwood Nurseries and are not wild collected plants. This has leaves with sharply pointed lopes and white flowers well-displayed on erect stems above the leaves. Good plant for the woodland garden where it plays well with the early Trilliums, Cardamines and various early spring ephemera.

Spotted Mandarin. This former Disporum is found from Michigan down into Georgia and has been a nice addition to our shade garden montage. The flowers are worth a close look and beg for macro photography as they are finely spotted to which the specific epithet maculata refers.

Double Blood Root. One of the great ephemeral spring flowers with double white waterlily flowers and bold gray-green rounded leaves. Beloved woodlander from the Midwest and the double form is especially covetous. These are flowering-sized freshly potted divisions and will settle right in your garden.

Very thrilled to be finally able to offer this Veratrum which was formerly in the genus Melanthium. Native from the Midwest to East Coast, this thrives in marshy, boggy settings or damp woods. Perfect in rich moisture retentive soil in the garden. White plumes of flowers to 5'+ in June and July. Deer proof - thank goodness for toxic alkaloids!

Silver Wings Evening Primrose. Narrow grayish leaves in a low branched rosette of leaves are perfect with the large 4" yellow flowers that open as the sun sets. Plant these where you can enjoy them during the evening wine stroll through the garden and then follow up with your morning coffee mosey. Good drainage, lean soil and sun. Well-suited for the rock garden, this Kansas and Nebraska native can take some dry.

Fragrant Dwarf False Indigo. An excellent plant for the xeric garden although not the best in sandy soils since it hails from good prairie soil in the midwest from central Canada down to Texas. Nice small woody shrub with erect small spikes of clustered small tubular flowes of violet blue petals and red stamens - whoa!