Master Gardeners of Northern Virginia
Promoting environmentally sound gardening practices for over 35 years!
The Glencarlyn Library Community Garden coordinators have recently created a new series of short videos highlighting the beauty of native plants. We will be sharing these videos on our website every month as well as glossary words that go along with each month's topic. This month's focus is on native shrubs with outstanding flowers.
Tried and True Native Plant Selections for the Mid-Atlantic
Wild Azalea is native to moist woods, swamp margins, and stream banks throughout the Mid-Atlantic Region where it thrives in dappled sunlight or high open shade. This shrub’s showy flowers, which bloom just before or as the leaves emerge, make it a great substitute for overused non-native and hybrid azaleas or other traditional spring-flowering species.
Featured Glossary word: Anther
Wild Azalea is native to moist woods, swamp margins, and stream banks throughout the Mid-Atlantic Region where it thrives in dappled sunlight or high open shade. This shrub’s showy flowers, which bloom just before or as the leaves emerge, make it a great substitute for overused non-native and hybrid azaleas or other traditional spring-flowering species.
Tried and True Native Plant Selections for the Mid-Atlantic
Found throughout much of the Mid-Atlantic, this drought-tolerant, adaptable shrub grows in open woods, river and stream banks, and rock outcroppings. Ninebark provides seasonal interest with showy flowers, winter-persistent fruits, and papery bark, which molts in thin strips on older branches to expose reddish to light brown underlayers.
Featured Glossary word: Persistent
Tried and True Native Plant Selections for the Mid-Atlantic
This native holly of the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains displays lustrous evergreen foliage, which, along with its adaptability to varying light and moisture conditions, makes it a desirable alternative to finicky boxwoods. Wildlife favor its fruit and honey bees its nectar.
Tried and True Native Plant Selections for the Mid-Atlantic. This compact shrub is indigenous to woodland edges, prairies, and roadsides throughout much of the Mid-Atlantic. Although somewhat slow to establish, its extensive root system, drought tolerance, and ability to fix nitrogen make it an excellent choice for challenging garden sites.
Join Extension Master Gardener Elaine Mills as she describes the characteristics and attributes of 35 native perennials, woody plants, and grasses that bloom during the summer months.
This trouble-free shrub, also known as Carolina Allspice, has maroon flowers from April to May with fruity fragrance.
The oakleaf hydrangea panicle inflorescence has a light sweet honey or vanilla scent; fertile flowers are creamy and fragrant and occur near the tip.
Sometimes referred to as Wild Raisin because of its dark ripe fruit, Possum-haw is the most showy of the native Viburnums with lustrous leaves, multi-colored drupes, and stunning fall foliage. The shrub is indigenous to low woods, swamps, and bogs throughout the region.
One of the few “good” Euonymus, this native shrub gives a spectacular show each fall. The raspberry color husks of the seed capsules burst open to reveal DayGlo orange covered seeds, hence the common name Heart’s-a-Bustin’. This surreal effect is fun to show children and adults!
Lavender flower clusters appear on new growth on this shrub from June to August, followed by clusters of fruit in show-stopping magenta in autumn. In the Mid-Atlantic Region, American Beauty-berry is reported to be native only in Virginia’s south and central Coastal Plain.
The last native shrub to bloom in autumn (from October to December), its fragrant, spider-like flowers illuminate the landscape in pale yellow.
Earlier classified as Photinia melanocarpa, this attractive native is often found in bogs, swamps, and moist thickets. Although edible, the fruits’ acerbic taste often causes choking – hence the common name. However, its red coloring and healthy nutrients make it useful in food processing.
Common throughout the Mid-Atlantic (except the northern half of Pennsylvania), Black Haw grows mainly in thickets and woods. The upright oval crown common in young plants often becomes, with age, irregular with drooping lower branches. Creamy white flowers give way to pink berry-like fruits (drupes), edible when ripened to deep blue-black.
The small, fragrant yellow flowers that cluster at the nodes of bare stems bloom from March to May.
Native to southeastern coastal areas, Dwarf Fothergilla shines three seasons of the year. Spring brings sweetly-scented, white bottlebrush flowers that welcome pollinators. Its summer dress is a pretty green. Fall leaf color is spectacular, turning exquisite shades of yellow, orange or red that brighten up the woodland garden.
Summer sweet and spicy is the pleasant fragrance of the white flowers of this pollinator magnet that blooms from July to August.
The sweet-scented, fuzzy white globes of Buttonbush bloom from July to August.
This native deciduous holly produces prodigious quantities of plump, red, berry-like fruit (called drupes), which decorate the plant from mid-fall into early spring. ‘Red Sprite,’ a female dwarf cultivar, needs the services of the male ‘Jim Dandy’ to make fruit. Purchase at least two females and one male for a “berry” good show.
