A Very “Proper” Garden Design By Mount Cuba Center Gardens
well this is the first time for home backyard to visit this amazing place I’ve heard a lot about it over years but we’ve never visited Mike Str is here to take us around Mount Cuba come on Mike let’s go and have a look follow us all right Paul we’re here in our formal Gardens we’re in the Wald South Garden that’s been newly replanted um so I’m here with some of our great plants this baptisia called lemon merang is just wow really showing off for us today typically it’s blue full Indigo yes typically it’s blue but you can find different cultivars um we stick to native plants in the formal Gardens we are you know mixing in cultivars just to kind of add some excitement to the Garden why would we want natives in the garden so natives are really important because they’ve adapted and grown with our native pollinators our Birds our all the wildlife so by using native plants in your homes you’re creating many ecosystems that support our native Wildlife so got so you encourage the right kind of birds to feed they feed on any insects that the plants attract you won’t have to use pesticides exactly exactly you’re going to have a more holistic Garden space look at this I love this plant this is a penan a native pensan digitalis and it’s a cult ofar called Midnight masquerade I love those dark stems they’ll open to a nice violet color flower on the outside and a little bit of white on the inside so they kind of really catch the Light so even when the flower has stopped it’s still a spectacular color isn’t it oh yeah the spectacular color and the seed heads are beautiful too and the Animals comeing e the seed heads ah I spotted something you got to tell me about cuz this I think is a great plant so Mike tell me about this amsonia all right this amsonia is called Starr it’s a newer cultivar and what I love about it is it stays nice and tidy beautiful foliage throughout the season even when it’s done flowering and then you get this great yellow gold fall color at the end of the season it’s one of a few perenials that really has a great full color so yeah fantastic plant but what I think in our area and especially if you’ve got a home where you got a lot of deer everywhere these things I would say are deer prooof because if you do this I’m going to pinch it very quickly you’ll see that a sap a white milky sap you you don’t really want to touch it cuz it can irritate people but it has a very unpleasant taste and the deer won’t go near it so we grow lots of plants here that people don’t even realize your native plants uh right in front of me we have a false sunflower uh this cul our is called bleeding hearts and it’s got this beautiful red sunflower a little later in this season spider plant yes exactly try to scansa uh this cultivar is called conquer grape and it’s kind of done the best in one of our trials as far as disease so we’d love to use this plant it’s look at that Smoky Bluey graay footage it’s perfect and it blooms for weeks now I’m spotting an underplanting what have you got going there underplanted with some hibiscus hibiscus emerge a lot later than these so as soon as these start looking bad that hibiscus is going to take see one right down there yeah you see it last year stalks won’t shoot but it shoots from around them yep yep so and this is the swamp hibiscus that have a big dinner siiz PL FL this is a big uh a reddish purple flow uh one of my favorite plants it’s getting ready to flower it’s in Bud here is uh parthenium andium it’s uh also called wild quinine uh it’s a native plant pollinators love it and it really is a great plant that kind of fills out between other rambunctious plants so this will come up in between other plants and call the pollinators and it’ll be alive with uh insects in a few weeks this is eye opening he’s not just using perennial natives in the borders and beds they’re in containers look at this one Mike explain what you’ve done here so this is one of our spring containers um we kind of used a nice shrub in the back that’s a rodendan atlanticum it’s a native aelia it just finished blooming but the foliage still looks great and I’ve added in some uh Virginia Iris a little bit of flocks some uh Coral Bells and also some more uh uh sweet Kate I can’t forget sweet Kate exactly I can’t forget that one I have to say Mike when I first saw this I was completely at a loss I had no idea what these plants it’s only when my eyes Dro closer to the soil level I realized what they were and even then I wasn’t sure if the flowers were part of it but you tell us all about this so this is a native uh collection of pitcher plants there’s a few different cultivars and species in here uh in the spring they send up these amazing flowers I mean they’re kind of Otherworldly and what they do is they send up their flowers first they get pollinated and then they start sending up their uh their actual pitches that’ll expand and open up and the pictures are the part that the parts that catch insects yes so what they do is a canorous plants they’re canorous I’m keeping my distance yeah but uh they’re just such a great plant with amazing adaptation to grow there’s an insect in this one just starting to go down yeah don’t go down back up well Mike’s been an absolute pleasure I have to say the more I look around the more native plants I see everywhere so if you want to learn about native plants Mount Cuba you’ve got to come here thanks ever so much oh you’re very welcome thanks for coming I hope you enjoyed it and are inspired by it I certainly am