Heya! I am heading down to Irving, TX next week to visit a dear friend who was my best garden buddy when she lived next door. She isn't able to do much now due to mobility issues, and her daughter doesn't "get" the plant thing, so I want to put in a few things for her while I'm there.
She mentioned that she has space for ONE shrub in a side bed, and I'm hoping maybe I can cram a couple of perennials in with it. It's right by a window, so we could hang a hummingbird feeder in the adjacent tree, and she'd be able to see it from inside (a plus during the summer heat, which she isn't able to tolerate well).
It sounds like the bed gets at least a half day of sun. I'll throw a handful of moisture crystals in the hole, and I know she is pretty good about watering plants, but I'm assuming some drought tolerance would still be a plus.
So... what one shrub would you suggest as a nectar plant for attracting maximum numbers of hummingbirds and/or butterflies to my friend's window? And if you have suggestions for "best" flowering perennials also, I'd appreciate it.
Thanks!!
Best hummingbird/butterfly shrub or plant for Texas (DFW)?
Lantana horrida. It is the #1 hummingbird/butterfly/hawkmoth attractor in my yard. It's low maintenance, heat/drought tolerant, and Mockingbirds/BlueJays love the berries. It will bloom and berry non-stop all summer long. If she has space for only shrub, look no further than this beautiful native Texas plant.
Carla
nice picture lantana loonie!
I second the Lantana, and add; Flame Acanthus, Anisacanthus wrightii, the hummers flock to it, it is fail proof, also Turk's Cap, Malvaviscus drummondii, all native and hardy.
Josephine.
My aboslute favorite for HB and Bflies is a naturalized native. It only becomes invasive when it isn't watched for a long, long time. If spent blooms are trimmed off and it gets a good shaping in fall it's no problem at all. Mine is about to begin blooming in the next week or so. Won't stop till October or a good cold snap.
Vitex~ Texas Lilac
http://pics.davesgarden.com/pics/debnes_dfw_tx_1156992199_217.jpg
Hummers came every 15 minutes to sip from it last summer. Many butterflies preferred it to the Buddleia too.
Deb, that is a lovely plant! My friend's favorite flower color is purple, so that one just might be the winner... and I'll see if I can't find another place to put in a lantana too!
I think I'd better check out "Go Gardening" to find a few places where we can browse plants! :-)
Critter, don't forget about Duranta which is blooming now in purple and will continue on into the fall.....Duranta here can be trimmed up as trees or made to stay shrub like...personally, I like them trimmed into nice size blooming trees...
Lantana comes in so many color combinations...my favorite is 'Irene'....reds, oranges and yellows
Oh, wonderful... my list is growing! I'd better tell Doris to sharpen her shovel... :-)
Dear Friends,
I am now officially through with outdoor gardening until we can come up with a better solution to cattle. I heard the dogs barking, looked outside my window to see at least 200 cattle romping on all my plants, the entire one acre veggie garden and 200 gladiolus about 8" tall!!!!!!
Having grown up down here, I jumped in my car (cell phones always left in every vehicle at all times) and raced down to the main gate to turn the car around facing all the cattle with my headlights. My brother was minutes away..Peppy and I held down the main gate as a major highway with traffic moving at high rates of speed is only 1'4 mile down the caliche road.
What can anyone do but laugh!!!! This is country living and fences strong enough to keep cattle out of my yard also keeps friends away.......
I have only been out here exactly one year, but there will be some changes made before next spring rolls around....
Houseplants, begonias and the gesneriad family are looking better all the time!!!!
gail
PS Just completed my giant round bed under a tree for hummers and butterflies was trampled down (waah waah!!!)
Oh, I am so sorry, that must be awful, bless your heart, I feel for you.
Josephine.
Oh, NO!!! I think I see some electric fencing in your future....
So sorry, Gail!
Bless your heart ((gail))!!
Ya might consider making a good fence around the garden, leaving your friends a clear path to your house.. just a thought
:-
You all are sweet to care, but I can't do anything but laugh this morning.....I didn't really remember what country life was like.....I am happy out here, but there is a limit to my patience of losing everything I plant!!!!
Now I am on my way to the hardware store for my brother to get the pieces needed to fix the watering system down at the garden.....the cattle stomped and broke pipes everywhere at the garden!!!!
I still have this mental image in my head of me driving in my own yard about 45mph trying to get around the cattle to get to the front gate before they got out onto the caliche road which would have taken them to a major highway!!!!
Off to work.......
gail
We were scrolling through this thread and looking up plant info last night, and we decided that Vitex was at the top of our list, but that we'd keep an eye out for others as well. We got a little turned around and never did find Callahan's (silly NavMan couldn't find a GPS signal, go figure), but we had good luck at Lowe's, of all places! I bought a lovely little Vitex bush, pretty shape with 3 trunks, just coming into bloom. The butterflies were all over some Lantana, but we didn't find any that was purple rather than orange or pink (I'm pretty sure there's a lavender and yellow colored one, and I know that's the only color that her daughter wouldn't veto).
We also picked up 3 pentas, which I didn't know much about but thought I remembered that butterflies loved them. I looked them up in PF just now, though, and I'm confused. PF lists them as hardy only to zone 9, but Lowe's was selling them as perennial in this area (complete with 1 year guarantee, so we'll be saving that receipt). I was also dismayed to see that somebody mentioned the dwarf variety we picked up ('New Look Violet') wasn't actually any good as a nectar plant... ??? Well, I'll put them in regardless, and if nothing else they will be pretty for her this summer.
Does anybody know if Lavender plants like TX? They're one of her favorite things from our gardens in MD, so I figure I have to try at least one for her here, more if they're likely to do well. Since going to the house today, I think she has more sun than I thought... most of her shade is more dappled than deep, and there are parts of the bed that I really think get a good 6 to 8 hours of pretty direct sun... I seem to remember something about part shade in TX being equivalent to full sun elsewhere, so I don't think our choices are especially limited. I've found a bare and sunny corner in a bed that I think could hold a shrub rose and a trio of lavender plants, so I'm going to see what I can find tomorrow afternoon. :-)
Thanks again, everyone, for all your help & suggestions!
Good luck with your project, Critter!!
gail
Critter - I grow English Lavender in my herb garden and I also have one in the front yard garden bed. It gets really hot here and these plants don't even act like it's bothering them. So I'd plant one for her if they are one of her favorites! :-) I have been seeing some Skipper Butterflies nectaring off of them! Which was quite a surprise! Go for it!!!!
Thanks, Gail! We're having a ball.
Becky, thanks for the input on the lavender... English lavender was what I was thinking of, since I think something like 'Fat Spike' (which I think is a lavindin) would get too tall to suit that spot.... something along the lines of 'Munstead'. Hopefully NavMan will get a GPS lock tomorrow and help us find those nurseries, LOL.
.
Lavender does fine here critter, I love them!...but not a particularly attractive nectar source for bflies.. Your right about full sun plants doing better with some shade here in the heat of summer. Also it's interresting which butterflies go for which nectar plants. Some butterflies go for certain colors over others too. Yellow is a superior color for attracting, and looks really great with lavender and or purples. Yellow Coreopsis if you cant find any Huisache Daisies. They take the sun well, and bloom like crazy. Plant a power house of a nectar flower near the lavender and everyone gets what they want.
I have all colors of good nectar plants, but if you look at all the pics I have shared since these began blooming, daisies or coreopsis.. about 85-90% have a yellow flower.
Butterflies love Asteraceae family plants.
Sounds like your doing a great job helping your friend!
Deb
Today: Northern Crescent and Amblyolepsis setigera
Try Tinkers Grove off west 114 then south on 26.. right on Tinker Dr. They are a great little native nursery... Close to Irving in Grapevine. They have some nice Milkweed and Coreopsis.. all kinds of bfly plants. Go in the back nest to Tinker Rd when you walk in and find the Pipevines... they are crawling with PVST cats. :-)
Oh, Gail, Terrible story, of course. And expensive if the watering system was trampled along withthe plants -- all that work!, but what a funny image was in my head -- I pictured you riding the car, slapping a whip across the fender to make it go faster, and having a rope and cell phone in the other hand (it was a convertible SUV in my imagination with those steer horns coming out from the front grill) Your hair was flying straight back and you were trying to outflank the herd to the fence line. (Sort of a "cut 'em off at the pass".) You had chaps that were hairy like a cow hide. Brown & white spots! LOL.
I have a lot of Calendula starting to bloom (also in the Asteracidae family)-- I just hope they like it because it blooms a few weeks earlier than Coreopsis here.
Suzy
Funnyyyy Suzy, what an imagination!!!
Hope gail is getting through alright... Indeed that was a sort of disaster. Cows and garden are a hard mix to tackle...yet good fences can make good cows. It doesn't have to be the end of gardening, just something well learned to work around.
Cool thing about plants is they grow back pretty quick. (It's only May, there's time to catch up.) Specially butterflies and hummer plants..
Deb, thanks for the nursery recommendation! We'll see if we can get up that way this afternoon.
You're right about yellow flowering plants and butterflies... I've noticed the same thing in my own garden, and at the nursery there were butterflies feasting at the coreopsis and the yellow/orange lantana. However, our options are limited here because my friend's non-gardener daughter has managed to add a few more "rules" -- nothing new in the front bed, I guess she'd rather just see bare dirt out there, and in the side bed no mixing colors, just blues and purples (which are fortunately also my friend's favorite colors)... based on past experiences, I'm pretty sure that a nice yellow coreopsis would be ripped out and trashed. *sigh* But that does still leave us with some options, and if even one butterfly or hummer finds the new Vitex, Doris will be just delighted. She's already delighted by how pretty that little bush looks and by the sweet scent of the blooms... even the leaves have a nice fragrance!
Those are some weird rules!
Tell daughter not to make me come over there and accidentally plant some dandilions..haha! (Irving isn't that far from me.)
Hey, Deb -- Is this the nursery you're talking about? The web site looks like a lot of fun! http://www.tinkergrovegardens.com/aboutus.html
What can I say? Her daughter is an extremely organized person, and sometimes she has some notions that you or I would find, shall we say, unusual, maybe even extreme. As a treat, to give Doris a break while I was visiting, she put her 4 pampered pooches in a kennel... and then she decided it would be "easier" to have us elsewhere also, so we are staying at a nearby Holiday Inn. We're pretty much having an extended slumber party, and we're enjoying ourselves immensely, but.... well. I think she rather resented my friendship with her mother when they lived next door, and clearly that hasn't changed. If she pulls out the new Vitex, then I think a drive-by sowing of dandelions will be warrented! LOL
I have to admit that it was hysterically funny.................I still have that image in my head of 'Granny Gail' cutting them off at the pass!!!!
There are a few blue Salvias that will take full-day sun and are low maintenance. Hummingbirds love my Garanitica and big Bumblebees love my Indigo Spire ---
Indigo Spire (tall, grows to 4-6')
Mystic Spire (a shorter version of Indigo, but can grow to 3-4')
Garanitica and Black & Blue and Argentine Sky (grows 2-4')
Victoria Blue/Mealy Blue (short, grows to 2' usually)
Evolution (a more purplish version of Victoria)
May Knight and Nemarosa and East Friesland (short)
These would look really nice with your Vitex. Also, Dark Knight Butterfly Bush.
Even with the limitations her daughter has placed on the flowerbeds, I think we can steer you towards just the right thing. :-)
Carla
Loonie, you have offered some excellent choices!!!!! All of the above are fabulous (even down here south)except for East Friesland
Nice list, Carla! I think you mentioned many of the really good Salvia! I have several varieties in my yard and love them all. I am trying to grow an orange flowering Salvia this year. It's a new cultivar. Don't know if I will have any luck, but I hope so! Time will tell. ;-)
Very nice list, and I appreciate your letting me know how tall they get for you! I have a couple of salvias back home I just might split and send to her... We weren't successful in finding lavenders today; all I saw was 'Fat Spike', and I wanted a shorter variety to use as a border plant... So I might just pick up some lavenders at DeBaggios (in VA) soon and send them along to her... I want some for my MIL also, and let's face it, I must get to DeBaggio's each spring regardless LOL.
We got the Vitex and the pentas in today, and we put together 2 herb pots (one with a trio of basils, the other with marjoram and oregano, both with creeping english thyme). The sad "living Christmas tree" that was in one of the pots got planted out in one of the beds, so it has at least a chance of surviving, although I'm not too hopeful about it. I also found what I hope will be good spots for clumps of 'Chocolate Peppermint' and 'Kentucky Colonel' spearmint, and I tucked in several clumps of mother of thyme (with the requisite purple flowers!). The herbs all came with me from MD, and now that I know the layout of their place better I'm making plans to send a few small boxes in the future -- not too much at one time, just enough for a corner here or a pot there. Oh, and I put a little start of American Honeysuckle behind the Vitex, right under the dining room window where it can scramble around at the back of the bed... hope it makes it!
We've been having leisurely mornings, and we had a few other things to do also, so I didn't get all the plants I'd had in mind from your suggestions... but she says her yard guy will get plants and put them in for her if he has a specific list and a landscape plan to follow... I can do that! :-)
We had really lovely weather today for being out in the yard... wonderful breeze, not too hot or too humid... just a beautiful day.
Do I really have to go home tomorrow?? *sigh* I'm thinking I'll just have to come back sooner rather than later... :-)
Critter!
This was the very best day we can have here in Texas, I'm real glad you were here for it! Yes that's the same Tinker nursery. I got there today just as new shipment came in. I got the famous Hummingbird Bush, Flame Acanthus..some Batface Cuphea, and Wormwood. One more pack of lady bugs.. all for under 50.
When a person gets too picky about colors and form that suit them, so much is at stake. If we plant for the critters, we get them to do a lot of jobs for us.. and no poison or herbacides are in order. It really tears up the real estate, (soil) too. Natural matter feeds the soil.. Who chooses?
:-Deb
Deb, in this case it's been enough of a struggle for my friend to convince her daughter that anything at all should be planted. I figure as far as the butterflies and other critters are concerned, any nectar plants are better than none. And some fragrance and color where she can see it from her window will cheer up my friend when she's having a rough day and not getting around well in the heat. :-)
I'm glad you got out to Tinker's today -- wish we'd been able to do the same! It really was a beautiful day.