Designing for Wildlife AND beauty

Late Summer is the time to enjoy all of the work of winter and spring.

Winter designing, spring planting and summer management lead to the beauty and easier pace of late summer heading into fall.

Summer perennials are at their mature size. Fall perennials are getting ready to bloom, and warm-season grasses are showing their fall colors before drying out for winter.

Butterfly Milkweed has been an awesome perennial, flowering all summer. There’s something really touching about seeing a monarch butterfly land on the flower and feed from the cluster of bright tangerine blooms. Even if Asclepias tuberosa wasn’t a critical host plant for Monarch butterflies to lay eggs and provide food for multiple generations of caterpillars, it is a beautiful low-maintenance perennial in its own right.

Sometimes landscapes get divided into categories like “Rain Garden” or “Wildlife Garden” or get characterized as being wild and messy and overgrown if they use native plants. It’s an understandable response to a lot of landscapes that are based on wildlife value of plants, without maintaining a design standard.

Beautiful landscapes have layers of evergreen trees and shrubs, flowering and berry producing shrubs, flowering perennials and grasses. The combination of plants from these categories can yield a landscape that looks beautiful year round.

It’s good to remember that native plants can fill all of these categories, creating a beautiful composition, that looks great year round, while supporting wildlife. To continue increasing public awareness of the need for designed landscapes with native plants, it important for landscape to be designed with mature sizes of plants and their aesthetic qualities at the forefront.

Butterfly Milkweed is the perfect example of a beautiful native plant that supports wildlife and looks incredible in any dry sunny location.