This Coneflower is a favorite of one of our newest Horticulture  team members!

Spring is just around the corner, and the signs are everywhere! Now that we’re in the final stretch before warm weather officially arrives, it’s time to keep an eye out for flowers and plants that are getting ready to bud and bloom, and you can even get in on the fun by planting your own!

Welcoming Spring with Fresh Native Blooms

This week we marked National Plant a Flower Day on March 12, and while the spring equinox is still a few weeks away, the time is truly perfect to get a head start on this season’s garden! With pollinator populations in decline, choosing native plants that support butterflies, bees, and other garden friends is a wonderful way to encourage biodiversity right in your own back yard. Our friends at The Nature Conservancy recently highlighted pollinator gardens as a wonderful way to model eco-friendly practices at home, noting that they frequently require less watering, chemicals, and mowing to maintain than lawns.

Here at The Greenway, we love sharing about our organic horticulture practices and the native plant species we feature throughout the park. We’re excited to dive in to another wonderful season supporting our local pollinator populations, through efforts like our Pollinator Ribbon.

To celebrate this year’s National Plant a Flower Day, we asked our Horticulture team to share their favorite species of flowers that can be found throughout the park during the year. Read on, and let us know: what’s your favorite flower on The Greenway?

 

Cam’s Favorite: Echinacea pallida (pale purple coneflower)

As we celebrated National Plant a Flower Day, we also welcomed the newest member of our Horticultre staff to The Greenway, Cam! He loves the pale purple coneflower because of its unique aesthetics. The color and foliage of this native plant change throughout the season and it also acts as a great pollinator and wildlife food source!

 

This unique flower can be found in the North End. Teresa loves drying flowers and the sea holly holds its color perfectly when dried, she also appreciates the flowers range in textures from spiky to soft bristles.

Our senior horticulturalist and designer, Darrah, loves peonies. These flowers are especially lush, full and slightly fragrant, making them a wonderful addition to any garden. She thinks of them as a truly decadent flower, and thinks they’re classic, old fashioned and impressive in a garden. While there are varieties of peonies that have blooming seasons throughout the year, those featured on The Greenway bloom in late May and early June, so mark your calendars to catch these beauties at their peak!

 

Did you know that there is more than one type of peony? Brian has a genuine affection for tree peonies, Paeonia suffruticosa, because of their stateliness and stature.  The plants are native to China, Tibet and Bhutan; flowers range from white, pink, red, and yellow.  These woody shrubs feature new growth that is fleshy and herbaceous in nature.

If you’re considering incorporating the tree peony into your home garden, it can be used in a mixed perennial border; planted with other trees and shrubs. Just make sure it has plenty of room to grow as it can reach heights up to 6-7’ and has good scale over time. When mature it looks at home with broadleaf rhododendron in a design; or simply planted individually as a specimen in the garden or even a larger decorative container.

To get a closer look here on The Greenway, just visit the gardens at the east side of the serpentine path in Chinatown where we have a few plants growing. And be sure to check back again soon if you like what you see, as there are opportunities to expand our collections with more of these plants someday soon!