Each spring, I look with admiration on my drifts of an Ontario native plant that asks so little of me, but gives so much in return: Polygonatum biflorum, smooth Solomon’s seal. Its tapered shoots emerge in April in my north-facing back garden, where the clumps under the black walnut tree that looms over my sideyard pathway are surrounded by the tiny flowers of the bulbous spring ephemeral Corydalis solida.
By mid-late May, looking back towards my garden gate, the corydalis has disappeared but the Solomon’s seals stand three feet tall.
It’s still early in the garden when they flower, the grasses in my deck pots still just inches high.
The colony in the back corner of the garden grows near a Tiger Eyes sumac and has as its neighbour fall monkshood (Aconitum carmichaelii ‘Arendsii’), not yet visible. Both enjoy the same shade-dappled, slightly moist, humus-rich soil.
It’s a testament to the travelling power of Solomon’s seals that they do sometimes subsume other plants. This ‘Ballade’ lily tulip – one of my favourites – is resisting.
But nothing keeps Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ from rearing its pretty head.
My garden features a number of invasive plants – some native, like ostrich fern (Matteucia struthiopteris), others enthusiastic exotics, like my lily-of-the-valley, aka ‘guerilla of the valley’ (Convallaria majalis). (I’ve written about that pest before in my blog about making a perfumed garden party hat!) But Solomon’s seal is up to the challenge and can stand its ground.
One that didn’t fare so well in competition with the Solomon’s seals was wild geranium (G. maculatum), shown below in a photo from a previous spring.
At the Toronto Botanical Garden, blue Amsonia tabernaemontana, shown in the background below, makes a pretty companion for Solomon’s seal.
I love the way the pearl-drop flower buds of smooth Solomon’s seal open, curling up their green tips like dainty skirts.
In November, the leaves turn yellow-gold.
Solomon’s seal and other woodland lovers were featured in ‘Shady Lady’, one of #Janetsfairycrowns from 2021, which I blogged about last year.
My next-door neighbour grows smooth Solomon’s seal as well; it met with the approval of the resident male cardinal.
Finally, speaking of cardinals, here’s a tiny video made in my garden featuring smooth Solomon’s seal with my regular choristers, cardinals and robins.
In this festive season, my 27th fairy crown celebrates a few stalwart plants that give some structure and life to my garden for the four-to-six months when the soil is completely frozen. I see red hawthorn fruit, aka “haws”, from my beloved Washington thorn tree (Crataegus phaenopyrum). Hanging down over my right shoulder is a bough from one of my gangly hemlock trees (Tsuga canadensis), complete with four sweet little cones. The dark-green prickly needles come from my yew blobs, i.e. the balls of Taxus x media ‘Hicksii’ in my pond garden. Over my left shoulder are bits of lacy arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis), aka “white cedar”, from the very long hedge separating my garden from my neighbour’s. The broadleaf evergreen is wintercreeper (Euonymus fortunei). Finally, the seedheads are purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) and snakeroot (Actaea racemosa) sticking out on my right side.
When you garden in Toronto, you learn not to expect too much – aesthetically – from “the winter garden”. Unlike those exquisite December scenes from England, France and the Netherlands of silvery hoar frost delicately coating each leaf and seedhead, December in the northeast is often more like a thick blanket of snow that not only buries all the plants in the garden, but the car in the driveway too! Yes, this was our car on January 17, 2022.
It broke a daily record with a total of slightly more than 21 inches (55 cm).
And it was a very hard slog with the snow shovel for my husband Doug! But I added a little muscle and together we cleared a path to the door.
As I write this, there’s a big red weather warning on The Weather Network. “Rain, transitioning to freezing rain, transitioning to snow with expected accumulations of 10-15 centimetres.” That’s 4-6 inches for Americans, not a lot, but in the course of a normal Toronto winter, we can see deep snowfalls, then complete thaws, then sub-freezing temperatures that hit certain plants very hard. Those vagaries are more challenging than a nice, cozy, insulating snow blanket that stays in place until March, like the one in the photo below taken in my garden a few winters back after a less dramatic snowfall than this year’s. Nevertheless, it’s what we have – and why books were invented, i.e. to while away these months before the earliest spring bulbs come into bloom.
If I stand on my verandah after a normal snowfall, this is my view of the pollinator island. Most of the seedheads of the perennials – echinacea, sedum, perovskia – stand up well through winter, until I cut them all down in March in anticipation of the crocuses.
This is dense blazing star (Liatris spicata) that fed so many bumble bees in summer.
Purple coneflower seedheads were foraged by loads of goldfinches in the autumn and now clearly show off the “cone” of the capitulum.
I love the brown “shaving brush” seedheads of New York ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis).
Every year I fill a big pot near my front steps with pine boughs, Magnolia grandiflora boughs with their rich copper-brown leaf reverses and bright-red winterberry boughs (Ilex verticillata). Usually it’s covered by snow within a few weeks, but with melt-and-thaw cycles in winter it does add a little festive touch to the garden.
And when we get the Christmas lights up on the Japanese maple and around our front door, the plant silhouettes in the pollinator garden add a natural touch.
My old garden gate lost its sentry boxwood shrubs this June as we resurfaced the driveway. There was no way to move the whiskey barrels I’d planted them in way back around 1990, since the barrel staves had finally started to break and the 30-year-old boxwoods had begun to suffer.
From the back yard deck, my garden always looks lovely in winter…..
…..even somewhat nicely maintained, which is the miracle disguise of snow! That’s my frozen lily pond in front of the lantern. The shrubs are the Hicks’ yews and that golden grass is Molinia caerulea subsp. arundinacea ‘Skyracer’. Sadly, the crabapple tree was also removed this year, the victim of one of the many blights that hit certain Malus cultivars. I am giving some thought to what its replacement could be, but I do want it to be bird-friendly!
Speaking of birds, they do love the hemlock trees (Tsuga canadensis). I often see “my cardinals” against the green boughs, but it’s black-capped chickadees that make most use of the cones.
However, the most popular plant in my garden for birds is not actually in my garden, though I pay each year to have a lovely young man come by to shear it, below, once the border perennials have finished for the year and been cut down. It’s my neighbour Claudette’s long arborvitae hedge (Thuja occidentalis), aka “white cedar”. As I’ve written before in my blog about designing a garden for birds, a tall, thick evergreen hedge affords wonderful habitat for birds – and it’s where “my” cardinal family resides, as well as unknown numbers of house sparrows in their own nests.
The other tree that shines in winter – and provides those red fruit for my fairy crown – is my Washington thorn (Crataegus phaenopyrum). Birds of all kinds love the berries – and occasionally leave some on the branches so I can photograph the clusters with snowy little caps.
But winter arrives on the calendar in 6 days – even though it always looks like winter long before that here. And like good old Saint Nick, I plan to do a little napping, plus a little reading, and a lot of photo-editing through the long months of winter that stretch ahead! After all, that view from inside the house through the witches’ balls is very inviting!
Merry Christmas to you all, and I’ll return before New Year with my final fairy crown celebrating winter in my meadows on Lake Muskoka!
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Did you miss a fairy crown blog in 2022? Here they are:
For me, autumn is a time of richness as the gardening season nears its end in an explosion of pigments and seedheads. Those pigments, in particular, have always fascinated me and I made a concerted effort to use brilliant fall foliage colours in my own garden design. So today’s fairy crown, the 26th, features the fall leaves and fruit of shrubs and trees in my Toronto garden in early November, including Japanese maple (Acer palmatum), Washington thorn (Crataegus phaenopyrum), burning bush (Euonymus alatus ‘Compactus’), barberry (Berberis thunbergii ‘Rose Glow’) and, draped down my front, a compound leaf of my black walnut (Juglans nigra).
Every year is a little different in terms of the parade of colour. Here you see my Japanese maple showing off its regular autumn leaf change as the burning bush hedge turns colour. In the pollinator garden, the ‘Autumn Joy’ sedum seedheads are ruby-red, but the fothergilla haven’t begun to change yet. The columnar red maple (upper left) that the city chose for my boulevard (I asked for one that turns red) has taken on its disappointing dishwater-yellow. Red maples, of course, don’t always turn red in fall.
In this photo taken a different year, the fothergilla in the pollinator garden is a rosy-apricot. That’s catmint in the front giving a nice glaucous contrast with Russian sage and echinacea seedheads adding structure.
From across the street, my neighbours see my garden through the fan-shaped yellow leaves of my second boulevard tree, a ginkgo (G. biloba).
The Japanese maple (Acer palmatum) I planted in front of my living room window decades ago is a great joy to me. It’s the straight species with green leaves – in Japan it would be a common forest tree. But in my garden, since there are no drapes on my front window, it forms a lacy curtain from spring (when bees buzz around the tiny May flowers) to fall. In very late October or the first week of November, the foliage turns a range of rich hues from yellow to apricot, scarlet and crimson.
The leaves are delicate, their branching exquisite. It’s no wonder they were the subject of the renowned Japanese woodblock artists like Hiroshige and Kuniyoshi.
As I’ve written before, my Japanese maple’s brilliant autumn colour lights up my living room in early November….
….. enhancing the glass witches’ balls I’ve suspended from the window frame.
And, of course, the leaves also provided me with an appropriate costume and landscape for my little geisha.
If there’s a saying that “good fences, good neighbours make”, it can also apply to hedges – which was how I ended up making this hedge in my front garden more than 30 years ago. (My current neighbours are lovely!) Today, environmentalists tend to shun burning bush, given its invasive tendency in milder regions, but my hedge produces very few seedlings, unlike the Norway maples in my neighbourhood which are a scourge. And this neon display in autumn is truly amazing.
My belly dancer’s costume was made from the leaves of my burning bush hedge.
Though there’s no fothergilla in my crown, it is definitely a big part of the fall colour in my front garden. In this photo made just before Halloween, you can see one of my shrubs has turned a rich burgundy-red beneath the Japanese maple.
The richer, more moisture-retentive soil in my pollinator island tends to produce orange and gold colours in the three fothergilla shrubs there.
Look at those colours! Who needs the spring flowers….
…. though they are lovely, if short-lived, in late May.
And, yes, I did harvest my flamenco dancer’s multi-colored skirt from my fothergillas.
Turning colour a little later in the front garden is my paperbark maple (Acer griseum) with its red trifoliate leaves.
Moving into the back garden, you see Boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata) cloaking the driveway gate. I didn’t plant this vine, nor did I plant all the Virginia creeper vines that pop up throughout the garden. That’s Mother Nature’s role and she’s very enthusiastic about it (!)
I confess that I wanted the Washington thorn tree (Crataegus phaenopyrum) in my garden long ago purely for its multi-hued fall leaves.
But it turned out to be a wonderful tree for bird life – IF the birds can out-compete the squirrels for the fruit. The robin, below, managed to do that, but so have cedar waxwings and cardinals.
Here you can see the range of autumn colour in the foliage of Washington thorn.
When we bought our house in 1983, the native black walnut tree (Juglans nigra) on the property line between us and our next-door neighbour was already mature. In the 39 years since then, it has hosted raccoon families in the crook of its trunk, carpenter ants in its bark and countless cardinals practising their song in its branches.
Our bedroom sits right under the tree, but we seemed to have missed the obvious ramifications of putting a skylight in our ceiling – particularly when windy nights in September roll around and the roof is pummelled with billiard-ball-sized nuts. Though the skylight has proven strong, we’ve replaced two car windshields since the tree’s branches — and nuts — extend far over the driveway.
The walnuts are enjoyed by the neighbourhood squirrels….
….. but the natural dye in the husks creates an unbelievable mess.
The arborist has told us the tree has rot in the trunk, but my neighbour and I have had it cabled and pruned away some of the branches over our houses to reduce the nut fusillade. It is our tree, after all, it gives us shade and we feel a duty to keep it – thus its inclusion in my 26th crown.
I don’t really notice the ‘Rose Glow’ barberry (Berberis thunbergii) in my back garden until it turns rich crimson-red in autumn – then it’s a show-stopper. It’s another one of those shrubs that environmentalists shun – especially in milder U.S. regions where it seeds around freely. I haven’t seen one seedling in my Toronto garden.
I have a fairly new addition to my back garden: a little sassafras tree (S. albidum). which I wanted especially for its fall colour. This autumn – admittedly one of the best for colour in many years – it has begun to display the reds, corals and yellows for which it is known.
Those colours, by the way, are on leaves that exhibit three distinct shapes: elliptical; mitten-like and three-lobed. This is what they look like on my light table.
Designing with and celebrating fall-colored plants and shrubs is my way of expressing my appreciation for nature’s yearly preparation for winter, as it cycles through the yellow/orange “accessory” carotene pigments in the leaves of certain species to harvest and synthesize as much sunshine as possible, once the ‘green’ pigment chlorophyll breaks down in cooler temperatures. Red colour is from anthocynanis. According to the USDA, “Anthocyanins absorb blue, blue-green, and green light. Therefore, the light reflected by leaves containing anthocyanins appears red. Unlike chlorophyll and carotene, anthocyanins are not attached to cell membranes, but are dissolved in the cell sap. The color produced by these pigments is sensitive to the pH of the cell sap. If the sap is quite acidic, the pigments impart a bright red color; if the sap is less acidic, its color is more purple. Anthocyanin pigments are responsible for the red skin of ripe apples and the purple of ripe grapes. A reaction between sugars and certain proteins in cell sap forms anthocyanins. This reaction does not occur until the sugar concentration in the sap is quite high.” Because the reaction requires light, you often see leaves (or apples) fully exposed to sun that are red while those parts that are shaded stay green or yellow, like these Boston ivy leaves on my fence.
I love making the leaf montages that celebrate these pigment changes, like the one below from leaves in my garden.
A few years ago I even held a photography show called “Autumn Harvest” featuring a number of my leaf montages.
Finally, this week as I walked out onto my front porch and gazed into my garden, this is what I saw– a multi-hued tapestry that shows that nature is the best designer of all. It’s my reward for a gardening season that began seven months ago with the first snowdrops and will soon come to an end with the first hard frost.
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My year of fairy crowns is soon drawing to its wintry finale. If you missed a few, here they are:
My 24th fairy crown is a celebration of early autumn in my meadows on Lake Muskoka. I have purposefully worked to create late season habitat for all the bumble bees that enjoy my summer flowers, primarily with the two native plants I’m wearing. The purple is New England aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae); the yellow is showy goldenrod (Solidago speciosa). Also tucked in are a few sprigs of the winterberry shrubs (Ilex verticillata) that grow naturally along the lake’s rocky shore.
I had some fun with this crown when I sat on the bench on my hillside above the lake. In late September and early October, the bumble bees and assorted other bees and wasps are almost frantically active, sensing, no doubt, that the days are getting cooler and their time is coming to an end. You can see a bumble bee enjoying the crown flowers after I took it off my head.
But I also experienced the useful life of a pollinator plant when I sat on the bench wearing my crown and let the bees come to me. Here’s a little video I made.
Most recent findings for showy goldenrod (Solidago speciosa) indicate that the species is native in Ontario to two regions, the “Great Lakes Plains” population is on Walpole Island First Nation at the mouth of the St. Clair River on Lake St. Clair; the other “Boreal” population is near Kenora in northwest Ontario. These distant (1200 km) ecological areas present different morphologies for the species, possibly indicating different varieties. In the U.S., the Department of Natural Resources is reportedly elevating the three known S. speciosa varieties to species rank; at present they are S. speciosa var. speciosa, S. speciosa var. rigidiscula and S. speciosa var. jejunifolia.
My plants were seed-sown from a Minnesota source more than 15 years ago and are very hardy; while spreading somewhat aggressively, they do not colonize via rhizomes like Canada goldenrod so are fairly easy to pull out if they become too happy. I have praised this plant in my blog before – see Sparing the ‘Rod, Spoiling the Bees.
Most important for me is their late flowering season and their large inflorescence, a boon for the butterflies…
…. and, especially, my bumble bees after most of the other meadow perennials have gone to seed.
Two native aster species flower in succession in early autumn. Below is smooth aster (Symphyotrichum laeve) flowering alongside showy goldenrod in my west meadow. It’s a little willowy and fragile-looking compared to….
….. New England aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae) with showy goldenrod, Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans) and big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) in the west meadow. That’s the seedhead of Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum) at lower right.
New England aster has a common rich-purple form, shown below being foraged by a tri-coloured bumble bee (Bombus ternarius).
It also has a distinct mauve-pink form, below, the one below featuring the common Eastern bumble bee (Bombus impatiens).
Winterberry (Ilex verticillata) is widespread in damp and boggy settings in Muskoka. It grows at the shore of the cottage and the fruits last into winter, until they’re eaten by hungry birds.
I made a second video for this time at the cottage, featuring some of the plants above:
By early October, the leaves of the red maples (Acer rubrum), so plentiful in Muskoka, have started transforming to shades of orange and red – and some yellow. This is one on our property which I selected to ‘keep’ (since I could have hundreds, given the number of seedlings that arise.)
It is visible framed through a cottage window beyond my “nature lamp”.
This weekend, of course, is Thanksgiving in Canada. It more accurately represents our harvest time in our northern latitude than the late November date south of the border. And Thanksgiving means PIES! My grandchildren take an active role in pie-making, including cutting slices for the apple pie….
….. and making sour cream cobwebs on the pumpkin pie.
The table is set for Thanksgiving dinner, usually with extended family from our bay…
…. and a centrepiece bouquet with flowers cut from the meadows. A few Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’ and Rudbeckia subtomentosa are usually still in bloom to add to the goldenrod and asters.
Turkey, mashed potatoes, dressing, green beans and sweet potatoes, with the relatives sharing vegetable offerings at our casual buffet.
Those pies appear for dessert, and though you’re really much too full… somehow “a tiny slice of each” is a familiar refrain.
The next day sometimes features turkey noodle soup for the freezer. Then it’s out for an autumn hike …..
…. through the forest behind our cottages.
There are many diversions for the grandkids….
…. and lots of eye-catching mushrooms to photograph. Sadly, this is a downed American beech tree (Fagus grandifolia), a species currently under attack from beech bark disease.
It’s important to know the exact species of mushroom before gathering for cooking. You would not want to eat Amanita muscaria var. guessowii or American yellow fly agaric, for example, since it is toxic (and dangerously psychoactive, though not a psilocybin ‘magic mushroom’).
I was fascinated with the pale purple colour of this wood blewit (Clitocybe nuda) growing under white pines and paper birches on our shore – though mushrooms can be any colour.
But it is the spectacular colours of the autumn canopy of our northern mixed forests that thrills us – the visual reward before our long, white winter on the Muskoka section of the Precambrian Shield.
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This fairy crown is the 24th in a long line of Tinker Bell crowns. Here are links to the previous ones.
This is truly my favourite time of year in the meadows at our cottage on Lake Muskoka. Why? Because the flower variety is at peak and the bees are at their most plentiful and buzzy. So my 17th fairy crown for August 5th celebrates the pollinator favourites here, including the champion, pink-flowered wild beebalm or bergamot (Monarda fistulosa), as well as yellow false oxeye (Heliopsis helianthoides), biennial blackeyed susan (Rudbeckia hirta), grey-headed coneflower (Ratibida pinnata) with its dark cones, mauve hoary vervain (Verbena stricta), oregano (Origanum vulgare) and a few of my weedy Queen Anne’s lace flowers (Dauca carota).
I call my wild places on either side of the cottage ‘Monarda Meadows’ because wild beebalm (M. fistulosa) is the principal perennial there and in all the beds and wild places around our house, where it grows as a companion to Heliopsis helianthoides, below.
There’s a reason wild beebalm is called that; it’s a literal balm for the bees, specifically bumble bees whose tongues can easily probe the florets!
Another frequent visitor to wild beebalm flowers is the clearwing hummingbird moth (Hemaris thysbe).
False oxeye (Heliopsis helianthoides) is one of the most aggressive natives I grow. I’m happy to leave it where it lands, but it often sulks in very sandy, sunny spots when summers are hot and dry. It’s much better in the rich soil at the bottom of my west meadow, and I try to ignore all the red aphids that line the stems in certain summers.
But heliopsis also attracts its share of native bees, including tiny Augochlora pura, below.
Unlike the blackeyed susan I wrote about in my last blog, R. fulgida var. sullivantii ‘Goldsturm’, the ones I have at the lake are all the drought-tolerant native Rudbeckia hirta, below, with a long-horned Melissodes bee. Biennials, they have seeded themselves around generously since 2003, when I first sowed masses of seed (along with red fescue grass) on the bare soil of the meadows surrounding our new house.
Sometimes they manage to arrange themselves very fetchingly, as with the perfumed Orienpet lily ‘Conca d’Or’, below.
Other times, they hang with the other tough native in my crown, hoary vervain (Verbena stricta). Both are happy in the driest places on our property where they flower for an exceedingly long time….
…… as you can see from this impromptu bouquet handful featuring the vervain with earlier bloomers, coreopsis, butterfly milkweed and oxeye daisy.
Bumble bees love Verbena stricta.
The other yellow daisy in flower now — hiding at the top of my fairy crown — is grey-headed coneflower (Ratibida pinnata), also a favourite of bumble bees and small native bees in the meadows. A vigorous self-seeder, it nevertheless does not always land in soil that is moisture-retentive enough for its needs; in that case, like heliopsis above, it wilts badly. But I love its tall stems bending like willows in the breeze.
Also in my fairy crown is a familiar hardy herb that fell from a pot on my deck long ago and found a happy spot in the garden bed below: Greek oregano (Origanum vulgare var. hirtum).
Its tiny flowers are also favoured by small pollinators.
The last component of my midsummer fairy crown is the common umbellifer Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota). As much as we think of this as an unwanted invasive weed in North America, it was reassuring to see a native potter wasp, Ancistrocerus, making use of its small flowers.
As always, my fairy crown has a lovely second act as a bouquet.
Finally, I made a 2-minute musical video that celebrates these plants that form such an important ecological chapter in my summer on Lake Muskoka.
