Sage… Co-Starring Parsley, Rosemary and Thyme

Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Who doesn’t know the next line of the lyrics? Who doesn’t begin to hum that familiar, iconic melody, perhaps recalling where they were in October 1966 when they first heard it sung by two fresh-faced New Yorkers named Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel?  One of the joys of reaching my age is that the folk songs of the 1960s still seem fresh and somehow relevant. Especially the ones where traditional herbs play a starring role!  And no song elevated herbs like the title song of the third Simon and Garfunkel album, which also included Homeward Bound.

But ‘Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme‘ debuted with some controversy since the duo listed themselves as songwriters in adapting this traditional 17th – 19th century English folk song (with its many versions) – which would be fine if it was their own arrangement. But it turned out that Paul Simon had first heard English folksinger Martin Carthy (who had first heard it from Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger) sing his own version when he was in England and copyrighted a similar arrangement without crediting Carthy, causing a rift that lasted until 2000 when they sang it on stage together. “Worse”, according to one music critic, “it credited Paul and Artie as if the centuries-old tune had emerged entirely from their imaginations.” (Wiki)  On the Simon and Garfunkel website, it says, “the duo used vocal overdubs and instrumentation to weave together a traditional song and anti-war protest to stunning effect.” Although not as overtly political as some of the songs I cited in my recent blog Vietnam – Songs of Protest, the song in its long-verse form does sound like the lament of a far-away lover, perhaps a soldier, asking impossible tasks of his sweetheart at home.

SCARBOROUGH FAIR/CANTICLE* traditional, adapted by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, after Martin Carthy (1966)

Are you going to Scarborough Fair
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine 

Tell her to make me a cambric shirt
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Without no seam nor needlework
Then she’ll be a true love of mine 

Tell her to find me an acre of land
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Between the salt water and the sea strand
Then she’ll be a true love of mine 

Tell her to reap it in a sickle of leather
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
And to gather it all in a bunch of heather
Then she’ll be a true love of mine 

Are you going to Scarborough Fair
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine

*The lyrics above do not include the “Canticle” verses, which are part of the official lyrics listed in their database, but they were the lines sung by the duo 15 years later in front of a half-million adoring fans at the September 1981 benefit concert in Central Park (below) to raise funds for the redevelopment and maintenance of the park. By then, Simon and Garfunkel had broken up and reunited a number of times; even their rehearsals for the concert were fraught with tension. Though they were elementary school classmates who had sung together since high school, initially as the duo Tom and Jerry, lyricist and composer Paul Simon was continually frustrated by the wandering attentions of his partner Artie of the sweet choirboy voice, who had ambitions to be an actor and solo performer. The concert represented a short-lived reunion for Simon and Garfunkel and produced a double platinum live album.

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The Sages, a Photographic Collection

The Scarborough Fair was a popular medieval market fair held in the town in Yorkshire from mid-August throughout September. Though it went on until the 1700s, it was at its height of popularity in the late 1300s. The use of the herbs in the song lyrics recalls their traditional symbolic meanings: parsley for comfort, sage for strength, rosemary for love and thyme for courage.  Salvia comes from the Latin word salvus meaning “healthy”. It refers to the European herb Salvia officinalis, an evergreen (where hardy) sub-shrub native to Mediterranean parts of Europe and the Middle East. Its use as a medicinal and culinary herb is recorded in ancient works by Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen. It is a lovely plant for modern herb gardens, and is a favourite of bees too. (And, of course, one of its principal uses is in our stuffing recipes for turkey.)

Salvia officinalis has a number of fancy-leafed forms, including beautiful ‘Icterina’ (often labelled ‘Aurea Variegata’). I loved seeing it a few years ago (far right) in this exquisite design by Paul Zammit at the Toronto Botanical Garden, along with parsley and calabrichoa, heuchera, hakonechloa, pelaragonium and carex.

Another ancient sage (from the French word sauge for the herb) is Greek sage Salvia fruticosa. I photographed the handful of leaves in the Peloponnese in November, during my botanical tour of Greece with Liberto Dario (Eleftherios Dariotis).  There it is used, along with sideritis, for making traditional Greek tea.

Another sage is used for an entirely different ‘medicinal’ purpose.  When I was at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew some years ago, they had an exhibit devoted to hallucinogenic plants, including ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi).  One of the plants was Salvia divinorum, otherwise known by a number of descriptive common names…..

…. including sage of the diviners, ska maría pastora, seer’s sage, yerba de la pastora.

Silver sage (Salvia argentea) comes from southern Europe and northern Africa. A biennial, it is better known for its spectacular, silvery leaves that form as a rosette the first year…..

…. than for its white flowers the following year.

Over the past few decades, I’ve photographed salvia species, hybrids and cultivars around the world – admittedly just a drop in the bucket of some 900 species worldwide. And I’ve grown lots of them in my own gardens, both in the city where the meadow sage Salvia nemorosa ‘Mainacht’ (‘May Night’) with its deep-blue spikes graces my pollinator island, attracting lots of bees…….

…. and in the containers on my sundeck at our cottage overlooking Lake Muskoka. There salvias and agastaches are my principal container plants intended to lure ruby-throated hummingbirds each summer. I don’t have a nectar feeder for these graceful little birds, preferring to give them organic sweeteners. (That’s sacred basil on the far right, Ocimum tenuiflorum – a superb bee plant).

The very best lures are the big sages in my hand…..

….. especially the champion – Salvia guaranitica ‘Black and Blooms’ (also ‘Black and Blue’ in previous summers).

This lusty big Argentine sage is simply the best for bringing in hummingbirds.

Last year for the first time I tried Salvia ‘Amistad’ bred by Argentina’s Rolando Uría, and it was popular with the hummingbirds too.

Salvia ‘Wendy’s Wish’ was a distant third, but still attracted its share of hummers

Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips’ is so colourful and a hummingbird favourite.

I did an experimental planting of Salvia ‘Big Swing’ (Salvia macrophylla x S. sagittata) last season. Although the hummingbirds visited it now and again, its strange flowering habit (at least in a container) worked against it.

Annual ‘Mystic Spires’ salvia attracted hummingbirds, too, but not if ‘Black and Blooms’ was in flower.

In my naturalistic borders at the cottage, Salvia nemorosa ‘Mainacht’ consorts with a number of self-sown wildflowers (which we now call exotic invasives…..) including musk mallow (Malva moschata).

If you visit the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew outside London in autumn, be sure to find the stunning salvia border there. This was October 25, 2014.

It was at Kew that I first saw Salvia confertiflora from Brazil…..

….. and luscious, deep-red scarlet sage, Salvia splendens ‘Van Houtte’…..

….. and pretty hybrids like ‘Phyllis Fancy’ below, discovered at the University of California Santa Cruz Arboretum and named for Phyllis Norris.

Chanticleer Garden outside Philadelphia in Wayne, PA is my favourite public garden in the United States. I wrote a 2-part blog after my June 2014 visit. Its many gardens change each year in the most creative way, but I think my favourite scene was this confection featuring the deep-indigo spikes of Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’ (from Zillmer Nursery in Germany), acting as dark vertical brushstrokes in a riot of cottage garden colour.

The Toronto Botanical Garden features its share of sages. Meadow sage, of course, is a prime player in the various June planting schemes. This is white Salvia nemorosa ‘Snow Hill’ (‘Schneehugel’, an Ernst Pagels introduction) with alliums, catmint, lady’s mantle and peonies.

Catmint, of course, is a beautiful partner for meadow sages, like Nepeta ‘Walker’s Low’, here with Salvia x sylvestris ‘Blauhugel’ (‘Blue Hill’), another Ernst Pagels introduction, and a splash of lady’s mantle (Alchemilla mollis).

In the Piet Oudolf-designed Entry Border at the TBG (I wrote a comprehensive 2-part blog on his design for this border), he incorporated his own introduction, Salvia nemorosa ‘Amethyst’, placing it near a wine-red sanguisorba.

His pretty purple-and-white hybrid sage Salvia ‘Madeline’ is also featured in the border.

And at the Royal Botanical Garden in Burlington, Ontario not far from Toronto, I loved this combination of Piet’s introduction Salvia verticillata ‘Purple Rain’ with creamy-yellow Achillea ‘Anthea’.

When I visited Chicago Botanic Garden in 2018, I was impressed with this mass planting of sky-blue bog sage (Salvia uliginosa)…..

….. enlivened by orange dashes of Mexican sunflower (Tithonia rotundifolia ‘Fiesta del Sol’). I wrote an extensive blog about my visit later.

Years earlier, I had been wowed by a themed garden at Chicago Botanic that featured bright-blue gentian sage, Salvia patens, with lots of gloriosa daisies (Rudbeckia hirta).

Speaking of gentian sage, this was one of the happiest combinations ever – a street planting at Vancouver’s Van Dusen Botanical Garden featuring Salvia patens ‘Cambridge Blue’ with Zinnia angustifolia ‘Profusion Orange’, purple Verbena rigida and fuzzy white bunny tail grass (Lagurus ovatus). Isn’t it lovely?

At Lady Bird Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas a few years ago, I was impressed by the meadow plantings of native mealycup sage (Salvia farinacea), a species that has become a popular bedding and container annual in colder regions.

There I was intrigued to see it looking so beautiful with native Texas yellowstar (Lindheimera texana), left, and was reminded of how effective it is with any yellow flowers, like the gloriosa daisies (Rudbeckia hirta) at right.

It’s such an easy sage to use: here it is with a rollicking sea of orange and yellow celosias at the Ottawa Experimental Farm one summer.

And this trio at the Montreal Botanical Garden was impressive: Salvia farinacea ‘Fairy Queen’ and ‘Evolution’ with a massed planting of chartreuse sweet potato vine (Ipomoea batatas ‘Illusion Emerald Lace’).

This formal knot garden at the New York Botanical Garden was enlivened by a mix of annual sage (Salvia viridis) in pink and purple popping up in the middle of the knots.

In spring, New York’s High Line features early-flowering Salvia ‘Pink Delight’ and ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ (both Piet Oudolf hybrid sages) mixed with amsonias. I blogged about that May 2012 visit too.

Last summer, I photographed and blogged about the Denver garden of Rob Proctor and David Macke. In June, their front yard is a sea of blue sage, including Salvia nemorosa and Salvia pratensis.

Even their long hellstrip (that’s Denverese for ‘boulevard’) is an azure avenue of sages, perennial geraniums and onosmas.

On my recent botanical tour of Greece with the North American Rock Garden Society and Liberto Dario (Eleftherios Dariotis), we visited our guide’s “salvia garden” in Paiania outside Athens. Let’s just say there are a few sages growing there, including many whose seeds he offers to customers worldwide.

What else? So many….. When I was in Tucson, Arizona seven years ago, I drove over the mountain pass to the fabulous Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. In its wonderful garden, honey bees were busy gathering nectar from native Salvia apiana. Guess what its Latin name means? Yes, “bee sage”.

At Idaho Botanic Garden a few Septembers ago, native rose sage Salvia pachyphylla was in flower.  And of course, I blogged about that lovely visit as well.

At Santa Barbara Botanical Garden, the appropriately named California hummingbird sage (Salvia spathacea) was, naturally, attracting California hummingbirds! This is the sweet little Anna’s hummingbird.

While at Santa Barbara Botanical Garden, I also saw Santa Rosa Island sage (Salvia brandeegii)…..

….. lovely, silvery Salvia leucophylla ‘Amethyst Bluff’, a selection of purple sage by Carol Bornstein.

During my visit to Chile and Argentina last winter on a wine tour, many of the gardens featured Mexican bush sage (Salvia leucantha).  What a great shrub that is for warmer regions!

I can’t remember where I photographed Salvia dorrii.

Salvia mexicana ‘Limelight’ has brilliant chartreuse bracts that are as much a colour feature as the blue flowers.

Biennial clary sage (Salvia sclarea var. turkestanica) is a cottage garden mainstay.

Even my local park’s Victorian ribbon planting took on a festive air when scarlet sage (Salvia splendens) was paired with chartreuse Canna ‘Pretoria’.

All the sages are wonderful pollinator plants and since insects on flowers are a specialty of mine, I always enjoy finding bees on salvias, like this big carpenter bee nectar-robbing from the corolla of Salvia ‘Silke’s Dream’ at Wave Hill in the Bronx (yes, a blog there, too)….

….. or this bumble bee foraging on annual Salvia coccinea ‘Coral Nymph’ on my own cottage deck.

Hmm.  I think that’s enough sage wisdom for one blog, don’t you? Except…. what about poor rosemary? It’s having a little identity crisis at the moment because it was known as Rosmarinus officinalis ever since Linnaeus assigned names back in 1753, but then came 2017 and one of those gene-sequencing revelations that turned taxonomy on its head.

Alas, it seems that rosemary is just a needle-leafed sage, now called Salvia rosmarinus. But sssshhh… don’t tell Simon and Garfunkel.

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If you liked this musical blog, the 5th in #mysongscapes for 2020, be sure to read my blogs on Joni Mitchell’s ‘Night in the City’, Paul Simon’s ‘Kodachrome’ and my life in photography, Vietnam Songs of Protest and my sentimental take on ‘Galway Bay’.

In Greece’s Saffron Crocus Fields

As part of a botanical tour of Greece this autumn, led by Eleftherios Dariotis for the North American Rock Garden Society, I had the most magical visit to the saffron fields of the west Macedonia province in the small town of Krokos. If you photograph flower bulbs, as I do, the saffron crocus is a kind of holy grail – historic, culturally rich, with a mellow yellow whiff of mystery and romance. So it was a very special morning, followed by a saffron-themed lunch in Kozani three miles away. Our tour started in the town of Krokos (yes, that’s Greek for “crocus”) at the Kozani Saffron Producers Cooperative, called the Cooperative de Safran, below. Founded in 1971, it has 2,000 members from 41 villages in the area. According to Greek law, the Cooperative holds the exclusive rights to the collection, distribution and packaging of Greek saffron under the name ‘Krokos Kozanis’.

Outside the building, I saw my very first saffron crocus (Crocus sativus) in a weedy little bed in front of the building. Note the three very long scarlet stigmas (or as the Greek say, stigmata).  The saffron crocus is not actually found in nature, but is an “autotriploid” version of its endemic progenitor Crocus cartwrightianus, which I’ll explain more about below.

Along the raised driveway behind the building, the murals celebrated this plant of antiquity…..

….. and the people who strain their backs to pick the flowers and harvest the stigmas from late October into early November (we visited on Halloween day) …..

…. and those who work with the stigmas once they’re dried and ready to become the saffron of our kitchen herbal.

In the building, we passed a room with a group of women at work weighing and packaging the tiny threads of saffron.

Depending on whose data you read, it takes between 85,000 and 150,000 flowers with their three stigmas to make 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of saffron. This has led to saffron being called “red gold”. In fact it was traditionally measured with the same types of scales used to measure gold.. I bought a few 2 gram packages from the Cooperative for €4.50 each, which I think was a very good price for top quality saffron. And given that there appears to be a lot of counterfeit saffron in powder form out there (usually with a little actual saffron supplemented with dyed filler), it’s important to buy your saffron from approved sources.

We listened to a presentation in Greek by the director of the cooperative, translated by Eleftherios.

Then we toured the product packaging area downstairs. I won’t even attempt to calculate what a tin like this filled with saffron threads would cost. But it would make a lot of risotto!  There was a drying room, machines that did goodness-knows-what and big cartons addressed to places in the U.S. all ready to be shipped.

Finally it was time to drive out to the fields, the “Krokohória”. The harvesting season was in full swing, with purple flowers dotting bare soil in field after field along the roads.

The saffron crocus, Crocus sativus, below, is not known in nature. Recent genotyping-by-sequencing has determined that it is likely (99.3%) an ancient hybrid of…..

….. two different genotypes (autotriploid) of a wild Crocus cartwrightianus population south of Athens. During our tour I photographed this species, below, en route from Athens to Cape Sounion at the most southerly tip of Greece.

Like all crocuses, saffron crocus grows from a “corm”, not a bulb. But unlike all other crocuses which can be pollinated and make seed, its triploid nature means that it is sterile, therefore all new plants must come from offsets of mature corms.

Each patch had a few pickers bent over plucking flowers to place in their buckets. If this isn’t the most backbreaking work in all agriculture, I don’t know what is.

But it is an ancient practice, one that we know reaches back in Greece 3,500 years. We can be that specific because of the great preservative power of volcanic ash. If you visit the museum on the island of Santorini (Thera), as I did eight years ago, you can see fragments of wall frescoes, below, found buried under layers of the ash that descended on the Minoan Bronze Age settlement of Akrotiri during a massive, multi-stage volcanic eruption in roughly 1600 BC.

Though no human remains were discovered, leading researchers to conclude that the inhabitants fled a few months earlier during preliminary volcanic activity, the deep layer of tephra, which includes the thick, silvery pumice layer you can see in the upper part of my photo, below (I was on the deck of a ship which was floating on sea water at the surface of the caldera that formed during the resultant collapse of the volcano)…..

…… created a kind of Bronze Age museum, similar to Pompeii. And because of that, we know that the young Minoan woman below was doing exactly what…..

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We were introduced to a husband-and-wife team of crocus pickers who agreed to be our interpretive guides. Their sweet dog kept them company.  Look at the woman’s hands; saffron is also an ancient dye.

The man dug up a clump of crocuses to show us how the corms form offsets, gradually forming large clumps. In time, these are dug up, the older corms discarded and the younger corms replanted.

We saw their basket of newly-picked flowers. The stigmas must be harvested quickly to avoid deterioration in quality.

Then the woman pressed into our hands little piles of silky purple flowers.

We inhaled the light, enigmatic fragrance. Saffron absolute is an ingredient in many perfumes, including those by Bella Bellissima (Royal Saffron), Donna Karan (Black Cashmere), Giorgia Armani (Idole d’Armani), Givenchy (Ange ou Demon) and Lady Gaga (Fame), among others. Saffron was also said to be an aphrodisiac. According to an article in National Geographic about Iran’s saffron industry, “Cleopatra was said to bathe in saffron-infused mare’s milk before seeing a suitor”. (Please don’t try this at home. I’ve heard it doesn’t work with low-fat cow’s milk and I have no idea what would clean saffron from enamel.)

The crocus pickers’ dog was getting a little bored….

….. but our Greek guide Eleftherios was happy. We had hit the harvest timing perfectly!

Because I’ve been known to photograph a few honey bees in my time, I then looked around to see what I could find in the crocuses.  There was one riding a stigma with great style (sorry, bad botanical pun)…..

…… and two rolling in the golden pollen. Like all crocuses, C. sativus produces lots of protein-rich pollen for bees, even though the flowers are sterile.

We walked down the road to see other pickers working their fields.

Discarded crocus tepals lay in piles at the edges of the fields, the end product of the morning’s harvest of saffron threads. What a wonderful visit we had.

Then it was on to the large town of Kozani where we sat down for a multi-course lunch, all saffron-themed. There was a saffron-infused chicken soup….

…… and a sweet (secret recipe) saffron sauce for grilled Greek cheeses….

….. and saffron chicken…..

….. followed by risotto, then saffron ice cream. All with wine. The Greeks do know how to do “lunch”.

It was the perfect way to finish our saffron adventure, to embroider our growing canvas of autumn-flowering Greek bulbs with these intricate, beautiful scarlet threads.

Orange Punch!

I’ve never understood the antipathy to orange in the garden that so many people seem to have. For me, orange is fun to pair with other hues, whether in a warm blend of citrus & sunset colours, like my deck pot at the lake one summer, below, with its nasturtiums, African daisies, zinnias and pelargoniums ….

….. or in classic combinations like orange and blue (complementary contrasts on the colour wheel), or orange and purple, as illustrated in a few combinations below. (Click for larger photo.)

I came upon a few great examples on my day at the Chicago Botanic Garden last week, One lovely planting on Evening Island paired Mexican daisy (Tithonia rotundifolia ‘Fiesta del Sol’) with blue bog sage (Salvia uliginosa).  I loved this duo!

These two are also wonderful pollinator plants, the tithonia attracting lots of butterflies, including monarchs….

….. and swallowtails, like the black swallowtail below.

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And the bog sage is a fabulous lure for bees. While I stood there for a few minutes, I saw lots of honey bees and native bumble bees and carpenter bees, like the big one below.

Orange can even be a feature in wetlands or pond margins, as we see below on the shore of the Great Basin, with Canna ‘Intrigue’ and its ruby-throated hummingbird visitor.

Another CBG combo I liked was in the Circle Garden, with old-fashioned orange zinnias (Z. elegans) consorting with a lovely pale orange-yellow coleus splashed with red.  I couldn’t see a label, but it might be ‘Copper Splash’.

A few years back, I did an in-depth blog post exploring orange flowers, foliage and accessories for the garden. If you didn’t catch it, you can find it here.  Orange! What’s not to love?

Butterfly Milkweed: PPA’s 2017 Plant of the Year!

You know that feeling of pride you get when a friend receives a well-deserved award? I feel exactly that way about an outstanding prairie wildflower that I’ve been growing here in my meadows on Lake Muskoka for many years. So, when I heard that The Perennial Plant Association chose my very favourite perennial – butterfly milkweed, Asclepias tuberosa — to be their 2017 Plant of the Year, I decided to honour it with my own blog.

Asclepias tuberosa-Apis mellifera1

The PPA award is not the first laurel to be bestowed on this lovely wildling. In 2014, it was awarded the Freeman Medal by the Garden Clubs of America, as a native deserving of wider garden planting. And the GCA president asked me if I would donate my photo of a monarch butterfly on the flowers, below, which I was happy to do (see down this page).

Asclepias tuberosa-Monarch butterfly

Despite the plaudits, butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) is not the easiest perennial to grow, unless you happen to garden on a sand prairie. It has a deep tap root that makes it rather difficult to transplant. And seeds are often notoriously slow to germinate and grow, sometimes taking 5 years to grow enough to set flower buds.  But give it a little rich, free-draining, gravelly soil and lots of sunshine, and watch the pollinating insects pile on. Foremost, of course, is the beautiful monarch butterfly, which uses it – as it does all milkweed species – as food for its caterpillars. If you’re lucky, you might see the female monarch ovipositing on its leaves or flowers.

Asclepias tuberosa-Monarch ovipositing

Come back and you’ll see the little egg on a leaf….

Asclepias tuberosa-Monarch egg on leaf

… or perhaps right in the flowers.

Asclepias tuberosa-Monarch egg on flower

Follow along over the next few weeks and you’ll see the various instars of the developing caterpillar munching away on the leaves….

Asclepias tuberosa-Monarch caterpillar

…. and the flower buds.

Asclepias tuberosa-Monarch larva

But monarchs aren’t the only butterflies fond of butterfly milkweed. Many others love the nectar-rich flowers, including the great spangled fritillary…

Asclepias tuberosa-Great Spangled Fritillary

…. hairstreaks, below, and many others.

Asclepias tuberosa- hairstreak

Bees love it too. On my property, I often see the orange-belted bumble bee (Bombus ternarius) nectaring….

Asclepias tuberosa-Bombus ternarius

….and the brown-belted bumble bee (Bombus griseocollis), too.

Asclepias tuberosa-Bombus griseocollis

Here’s a little video I made of the brown-belted bumble bee foraging on my butterfly milkweed. In the background, you can hear a red squirrel scolding and a lovely Swainson’s thrush singing its flute-like song.

Naturally, many native bees seek nectar from butterfly milkweed.  I’ve seen long-horned (Melissodes) bees….

Asclepias tuberosa-Megachile

…. and tiny, green sweat bees (Auguchlora pura), all enjoying the flowers.

Asclepias tuberosa-Augochlora pura

Honey bees are avid foragers, too.

Asclepias tuberosa-Apis mellifera3

Seek doctor’s advice before thinking to act.* If you want to get treated for alcohol addiction or drug abuse, you can get effective treatment in these rehab cheap cialis 5mg centers. Precautions This drug ought to be generic cialis in canada used by an impotence victim not by anyone else, not even a disorder. This process accentuates the production of contractile proteins which are used to make your muscle contract more forcefully, as well as structural proteins that are present sildenafil generico online naturally in the body. Human growth hormone or HGH is a hormone controlled canada tadalafil djpaulkom.tv by your pituitary gland. Okay, you get the picture. This is one superb pollinator plant!  But how should one grow it, and with what companions?  I have grown it in both reasonably rich, sandy soil, and very dry, lean, sandy soil, and I can attest that it prefers more moisture than other prairie plants, such as gaillardia and coreopsis. This is what it looked like near my septic system this July. I managed to keep it watered by running two hoses up the hill behind my cottage, but it was a struggle until a few rains came.

Drought-Milkweed

However, if summer rains are abundant, it’s happy with those more drought-tolerant natives.  Here it is growing very wild in dry soil with Coreopsis lanceolata.

Asclepias tuberosa-wild planting

And it does well in fairly dry conditions with Anthemis tinctoria.

Asclepias tuberosa & Anthemis tinctoria

On the other hand, it does well in reasonably rich soil with my Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’, where I can run the hose if rains don’t come (like this summer)…..

Asclepias tuberosa & Crocosmia 'Lucifer'

…. and peeking up through my grassy monarda meadow, near a lush pink lily.

Asclepias tuberosa & Lily & Monarda

I’ve grown it with Penstemon barbatus ‘Coccineus’….

Penstemon barbatus & Asclepias tuberosa

…and with blackeyed susans (Rudbeckia hirta).

Rudbeckia & Asclepias 2

And I’ve seen it looking pretty with daylilies and catmint in a friend’s garden, too.

Asclepias tuberosa & Hemerocallis-Nepeta

Butterfly milkweed’s blooming season is so long, it counts numerous July and August plants as companions. Here is a bouquet I photographed on July 17th, 2010 with blackeyed susans (Rudbeckia hirta), false oxeye (Heliopsis helianthoides), veronica (Veronica spicata ‘Darwin’s Blue’) and blue vervain (Verbena hastata).

Asclepias tuberosa & bouquet companions

… and a collection of little bouquets I made on August 16th, 2013.

Asclepias tuberosa-August 16-Bouquets

If you want to know absolutely everything that might flower at the same time, here’s a montage I made one year on July 7th, 2014. Yes, that’s butterfly milkweed near the lower right corner. See if you can guess the rest!

Asclepias tuberosa & plant companions-July 7-2013

I have planted dozens of young butterfly milkweed plants here at Lake Muskoka over the years, like these ones offered by the Canadian Wildlife Federation (along with suitable nectar plants), as an encouragement to ‘bring back the monarch butterfly’. Most took, provided I irrigated them for the first summer; a few didn’t.

Canadian Wildlife Federation-Milkweed

But I have also managed to grow many from seed, which is harvested from the typical milkweed fruit capsule.  The ones that were most successful were those I guerilla-sowed, using the toe of my boot to kick them in along the edge of a gritty, community pathway midway down the hillside on a neighbour’s property. Under that granitic gravel, below, there was actually rich sandy soil and adequate moisture, given that the path sits mid-slope on the hill. But this tough environment best replicates the natural ‘sand prairie’ that butterfly milkweed likes.

Asclepias tuberosa-growing in gravel

You can also buy a seed mix in multiple colours:  ‘Gay Butterflies Mix’, below.

Asclepias tuberosa 'Gay Butterflies Mix'

Want to try your hand sowing butterfly milkweed? Follow these seeding instructions in a propagation guide in the Minnesota newsletter of Wild Ones:  “Collect when pods are cracked open. Remove down; cold stratify in fridge in damp sand for 90 days. Broadcast on soil surface in spring when soil is warm.

Best of luck growing this worthy award winner!  You and the pollinators – including the lovely monarch butterfly – are worth the effort.