Mass Plantings
by Derek Fell
It was William Wordsworth, the famous British poet, during a walk beside a lake, who captured the drama of viewing a mass planting of daffodils when he wrote: “Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in spritely dance.”
Recently I was reminded of the impact that ten thousand blooms can produce in a home landscape when I recently visited the wholesale plant nursery of Randy Heffner, in Pipersville, Bucks County and saw tens of thousands of native pitcher plants growing in vast propagating beds. Mostly native to the New Jersey Pine Barrens and Southern swamps, pitcher plants are hardy perennials that like to grow in full sun in moist soil, looking like erect fluted vases and quietly trapping insects such as pesky mosquitoes and black flies. The flared tubes are composed of fused leaves in mostly green, yellow, red and a gorgeous translucent white with red veins. In spring a rather curious flower emerges, usually yellow or red and pendant, with an arrangement of petals that is shaped like a bun. The pitcher emits an aroma that attracts insects, drawing them to the lip of the tube, then luring them down to a pool of digestive juices where they are liquefied and turned into plant food.
Randy is one of the largest suppliers of aquatic plants in North America, sold through his plant nursery, Aquascapes Unlimited, which also sells choice varieties of water lilies, lotus, pickerel weed and bullrushes. In addition to selling pitcher plants in a mature state he also sells the elegant tubes as cut flowers to florists, growing them in a medium composed of 50 percent peat and 50 percent Perlite. Although this mix is devoid of plant nutrients it ensures that the pitcher plants grow in a salt-free medium as the one condition they cannot tolerate is a salty soil, deriving their nutrient needs from the insects they catch.
Randy’s pitcher plants belong to the family known as Sarracenia and many of them are hybrids from Randy’s own breeding program or through similar breeding programs at the University of North Carolina. Other insect-eating plants represented in Randy’s collection include sundews and Venus fly-traps that are best grown in containers close to a deck or patio in order to be appreciated as the insect-eating parts are smaller than pitcher plants. Sundews trap insects with sticky tentacles while the Venus fly-trap has leaves with pads that resemble a bear trap, snapping shut when delicate hairs inside the trap are touched by an insect.
There are many other hardy perennial plants beside daffodils and pitcher plants that can create a massed, self-sustaining colony. A good choice for shady, deciduous woodland includes native Virginia bluebells, white trillium and wild blue phlox—all of which are available as transplants from the Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve south of New Hope on the river Road.
For sunny meadows few flowering perennials can match the impact of summer-flowering Black-eyed Susans, purple coneflowers or fall-flowering swamp sunflowers, all of which are native, thriving in open meadows. Four non-natives that I admire are spring-flowering English and Spanish bluebells, dame’s rocket and summer-flowering daylilies. The bluebells grow from bulbs planted in fall to flower the following spring. English bluebells are fragrant, and although Spanish bluebells are not, they have a more conspicuous flower cluster, thriving in light shade. A native of Europe, dame’s rocket is a phlox that self-seeds to produce airy white, pink and purple flowers in sun or light shade, while daylilies are native to Asia and colonize waysides as well as meadows and woodland. Their orange, trumpet-shaped blooms last two weeks, the plants themselves spreading mostly by fleshy tubers that can break off from the mother plant and float about during heavy rains.
Another non-native I adore and which does not become invasive, is the hellebore. From an initial planting of 50 one-year old seedlings of Helleborus orientalis I now have thousands naturalized along woodland paths. Resembling single-flowered roses in their petal arrangement, they are mostly white, pink and dusky-red, although hybridizers have produced maroon, apricot, slate-gray and yellow forms with exotic spots leading to a crown of yellow stamens. I like to see them partnered with another self-seeding European perennial – primroses, especially those in the ‘Barnhaven’ family because they have the most extensive color range, including yellow, orange, red, blue and white. Mixtures of Japanese primroses also have an extensive color range and prefer a moist soil in full sun.
Derek Fell is a prolific garden writer with more than 100 garden books to his credit. He lives in Tinicum Township at historic Cedaridge Farm, and spends time at a frost-free tropical garden on Sanibel Island, Florida.