More bird life in the garden
New plants at this week's Chelsea Flower Show

No, they’re NOT natives!

Phalarisfeesey5256400 We went to a “Native Plant Sale” at a local environmental education centre yesterday. You know - support the cause, pick up one or two plants for the expanding garden. We’d been before, and found some of the plants on offer not to be native. I’d written them a friendly note pointing this out. They didn’t reply.

Turned out they didn’t take any notice either. The same non-natives were on sale as last time… and still flagged as native. What sort of plants do I mean? The two that really astonished me last time, and did so again yesterday, were Phalaris arundinacea ‘Feesey’ and Filipendula ‘Kahome’.

Of course, plain old reed canary grass, Phalaris arundinacea, is native all over the USA. But ‘Feesey’ is a variegated form found in a garden in Devon… that’s Devon in England! And as for Filipendula ‘Kahome’. I asked the world authority on Filipendula, botanist Peter Barnes, about this plant he told me it was a hybrid between F. multijuga, which is native to Japan, and probably F. purpurea, which is native to – Japan!

Other "natives" at the sale included:
Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’- a hybrid between an American and an Asian species;
Aquilegia ‘Biedermeier Mixed’ – a complex hybrid from Germany in mixed colors with distinctly unnatural upward facing flowers;
Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldstrum’ – the species is native, but ‘Goldsturm’ was found in Czechoslovakia!
Gaura lindheimeri ‘Whirling Butterflies’ - the species is a US native (but only in Texas and Louisiana, thousands of miles away from here in Pennsylvania), ‘Whirling Butterflies’ is a garden selection.

You get my point. Here in Pennsylvania these are not native plants. And an environmental education centre should not be pretending that they are just raise a few dollars.

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