May 12, 2020
Around the Nursery World and your Garden 5/11
From Around the Nursery World and your Garden….
I’ll be adding to this post during the week with things you can plant in your garden with summer on the way….
Island mallows – Lavatera assurgentiflora and variants are also good to plant in summer. These grow fast, get big, and have lots of flowers. At the end of summer they can drop a few leaves then start up again in fall. While rare on the islands they grow like weeds in this region an coast Calif.
These can reach 12′ +/- and can be a good hedge between neighbors.
Columbines/Aquilegia are generally spring flowering but not always. Aquilegia eximia or serpentine columbine flowers summer through the end of fall. These are Calif. natives that live from San Luis Obispo on up. Their flowers are also exceptionally big. A good one for summer/fall color in your garden and hummingbird food. Below shows them in their 3 gallon pots waiting for your garden and mine too.
The flowers…
Milkweed? Milkweed or Asclepias is food for monarch and queen butterfly caterpillars. The most ask for and most common is narrow leaf milkweed. It’s the most common to our hills. Another milkweed that’s native but not to our region is showy milkweed or Asclepias speciosa. These break dormancy a bit late but they have really big leaves for fall mating season and very showy flowers.
They start out like this from the nursery:
They grow very fast with the leaves widening out. The monarchs find them in fall and lay their eggs.
The egg and the caterpillars…next year you’ll have the flowers.
Next year you’ll have flowers and they are pretty showy!
The mountain mints are also now ready to plant. We stocked out of these but we now have them ready for your garden. They will flower from spring through early winter. Very minty fragrance.
Here’s what they look like at the nursery in 1-gallon pots. 
In just a few weeks in your garden…they burst into flowers and they monarch, bees, and hummingbirds will find them.
And tomorrow night we’ll post more!
