This native shrub is a great choice for spectacular fall color that rivals the ubiquitous Burning Bush. Fragrant 2- to 6-inch long white flowers bloom in early summer on the ends of arching branches. It is a trouble-free shrub that tolerates heavy shade or full sun, wet or dry soil, and grows 3 to 5 ft. high with a larger spread. Virginia Sweetspire is very effective when planted in a large mass. Plants should be provided with winter protection if temperatures dip below -20 degrees F.

Photo Courtesy Missouri Botanical Garden PlantFinder

Great plants that bloom in the fall include Helianthus (Perennial Sunflower), Helenium (Helen’s Flower), Eupatorium (Joe Pye Weed), Tall Sedum, Chelone (Turtlehead), Sweet Autumn Clematis, and Aster. Many plants that start blooming in the summer continue through fall. These include Echinacea (Coneflower), Rudbeckia (Black-eyed Susan), Nepeta (Catmint), Coreopsis (Tickseed) and Anemone. Deadheading (removing spent flowers) or shearing back these plants encourages continued flowering.

Tall Sedum

The feathery plumes and muted blue and green leaves of ornamental grasses contrast nicely with late-blooming perennials and last well into winter. Vegetables with brightly colored leaves can also add fall interest to the garden. Seeds of leaf lettuce, salad greens, and swiss chard can be sown in August. The interesting textures of carrot, kale, and ornamental cabbage leaves add contrast to the garden as well. These plants do double duty in the garden, first as foliage interest and then harvested for salads.

Perennials with yellow, red, purple, silver, and blue leaves are great additions to the fall garden. Combining fall flowers with fall foliage gives more depth to the garden. Amsonia leaves turn a nice yellow, and the leaves of Lysimachia clethroides turn yellow and red. Some of the Cranesbills (Geranium spp.) have bright red fall leaves. The leaves of shrubs such as Aronia, Cotinus, Itea, and Fothergilla turn the rich autumn colors of red, yellow, and orange. Setting these colorful plants against a background of dark evergreens is a great way to show off the fall foliage in your garden.

Cotinus obovatus autumn leaves

If your garden’s season seems to end in August and you’d like to extend your enjoyment of it, call or e-mail MDI Grows. We can design more fall color into your garden. Your existing plants can be moved or pruned to make space for plants with colorful fall foliage or bold autumn blooms.

Slug and snail-resistant plants

Astilbe – Astilbe species and cultivars

Beard Tongue – Penstemon species and cultivars

Black-eyed Susan – Rudbeckia species and cultivars

Bleeding Heart – Dicentra species and cultivars

Catmint – Nepeta species and cultivars

Columbine – Aquilegia species and cultivars

Coneflower – Echinacea species and cultivars

Cushion Spurge – Euphorbia species and cultivars

Foxglove – Digitalis species and cultivars

Hardy geranium – Geranium species and cultivars

Hellebore – Helleborus species and cultivars

Heuchera – Heuchera species and cultivars

Jacob’s Ladder – Polemonium species and cultivars

Lady’s Mantle – Alchemilla species and cultivars

Lamb’s Ear – Stachys species and cultivars

Lungwort – Pulmonaria species and cultivars

Masterwort – Astrantia species and cultivars

Meadow Rue – Thalictrum species and cultivars

Meadow Sage – Salvia species and cultivars

Peony – Paeonia species and cultivars

Phlox – species and cultivars

Pincushion Flower – Scabiosa species and cultivars

Spotted Dead Nettle – Lamium species and cultivars

Stonecrop – Sedum species and cultivars

Waxy coated blue-leaved Hostas

Ferns

Ornamental Grasses

Roses

Hydrangea – Hydrangea species and cultivars

Potentilla

Rhododendron

Holly – Ilex

Viburnum species and cultivars

Control of slugs and snails

Slugs are most active at night and in wet weather. Promote good air circulation around plants. Encourage predators. These include birds, frogs and toads.

Water in the morning instead of in the evening so that foliage is dry overnight.

Place saucers or slug traps filled with beer in the garden to trap slugs. Clean them out every day or two and replenish – use cheap beer!

Lure slugs away from the garden by setting out grapefruit and melon rinds in the evening. Dump the slugs into a bucket of soapy water the next morning to kill them.

Set empty flowerpots or milk cartons on their sides in the shade. Dispose of slugs and snails that congregate on them.

Water a small area, away from your garden. Set a wooden board down – elevate it slightly with a rock. Turn it over and dispose of the slugs and snails that have congregated on it overnight.

Use a barrier of pine needles, coffee grounds, crushed eggshells, or diatomaceous earth (not swimming-pool grade) around plants. Reapply after a rain.

Handpick slugs and snails after dark. Wear gloves!

Use thin copper strips (1-3″ wide) wrapped around plant pots and susceptible plants to create a protective barrier. Slugs and snails receive a small shock when they try to cross copper.

Try slug bait containing iron phosphate. Sluggo, Escar-Go, and Worry-Free are three of these products, which are non-toxic to wildlife and pets. Sprinkle the pellets around the areas you want to protect. Don’t use baits containing metaldehyde, a chemical that is toxic to pets, especially dogs and horses.

This fern is an excellent groundcover for a wide range of soils, and grows best in part to full shade. With consistent moisture, it will also do well in full sun. Native to the eastern and midwestern United States, it grows 18-24″ high and spreads by rhizomes to form colonies. The lacy, light-green fronds release the scent of fresh mown hay when crushed or bruised, giving the plant its common name.

Cinnamon ferns are just now unfurling their fronds in our area. They will open up to become 2′ to 3′ tall clumps. With constant moisture, they can reach 5′ in height. Cinnamon ferns, named for their bright cinnamon-colored fertile fronds, grow best in medium to wet, rich, acidic, humusy soils in part shade to full shade. Cinnamon ferns have a dense tuft of small rusty hairs at the base of each pinna, or leaflet, an indentifying feature that helps to distinguish them from their close relative, the Interrupted Fern, Osmunda claytoniana.

An organic approach to lawn care uses products and soil amendments derived from plants, animals, or minerals. It improves the health of the soil, providing the necessities for a healthy lawn. Organic matter in soil feeds essential microbes, which convert nutrients and minerals into a form that plants can use. The humus created by this process improves the soil structure and increases the water holding capacity of the soil. Healthy soil supports healthy grass. A healthy lawn resists most disease, pests and drought.

A chemical approach to lawn care treats the symptoms of lawn problems, not the underlying cause. This approach may work quickly, but problems usually come back. Chemical pesticides can kill beneficial organisms that help to keep your soil healthy. Pest insects can develop immunity to insecticides over time; so stronger chemical compounds are developed to kill them. Synthetic fertilizers give grass plants quick bursts of nutrients that disrupt the delicate balance involved in plant growth. Leaf growth is promoted at the expense of root growth. When roots do not fully develop, they are not able to reach nutrients and moisture that is more than a couple of inches below the surface. This kind of lawn can’t withstand drought and frequent watering is needed. Nutrient runoff from over application or improper application of fertilizers can degrade ponds, lakes, rivers, and coastal waters and contaminate groundwater.

MDI Grows can help you to establish or improve your lawn using organic methods. As Paul Tukey explains in his book The Organic Lawn Care Manual, a successful natural lawn can be grown by following this advice: “treat your soil well with compost and fertilizers, pick the right grasses for your climate and sunlight situation, water well, use the right tools, and mow properly with a sharp blade.”

If you choose to have Burdick &Associates design your landscape, we will take into consideration the amount of lawn you want for outdoor activities, the amount of lawn you want to maintain, the amount of sunlight available for lawn areas, and the soil properties.

MDI Grows will maintain your lawn in an environmentally sensitive way. If your lawn is not looking its best, our staff will look at the texture and structure of your soil, soil depth and drainage. A soil test will be done to determine if there are any nutrient imbalances. Based on the results of the soil test, compost will be added as needed, as well as any natural fertilizers or soil amendments. If there are problems with soil depth or drainage, MDI Grows and Burdick &Associates Landscape Design will work together to provide you with a sensitive and sensible solution.

Compost added to the garden improves the soil structure. Sandy soils will hold water better and drainage is improved in clay soils. Compost helps to reduce soil compaction, helps the soil to hold nutrients, helps to maintain a neutral pH, and promotes healthy plants that are less susceptible to diseases and insect pests. Earthworms, beneficial soil insects and microorganisms benefit from the nutrients available in compost. Compost supplies micronutrients for plants that are often deficient in garden soil.

There are many ways to turn kitchen scraps and yard and garden waste into soil building compost. The simplest method is to use a purchased bin or tumbler, but if you have enough space, you can build a two- or three-bin system with wood and hardware cloth. A compost heap or pile doesn’t require a structure, but it is not as neat and tidy as a bin. Turning the pile will help to speed up the composting process.

Materials that make good compost include vegetable and fruit scraps, coffee grounds, wood ash, leaves, shredded newspaper, straw, cow and horse manures, poultry manures, seaweed, and garden waste. Avoid using diseased plants, weed seeds, coal ash, paper with colored inks, meat, bones, fish, fats, dairy products, inorganic materials, pet droppings, and grass clippings or garden waste that have been sprayed with herbicides or pesticides.

Fothergilla major showing fall color, at left of photo

Both of these native shrubs produce lightly fragrant white bottle brush-shaped flowers in spring. The trouble-free blue-green leaves turn yellow, orange, and red in the fall and stay on the plants for a long period. The Dwarf Fothergilla grows 2 to 3 ft. high and wide or larger and the Large Fothergilla grows 6-10 ft. high and wide. Both are easy to grow in full sun or light shade, in moist but well-drained organically rich soil. Lovely when massed in a shrub border or native planting.

This deciduous native shrub will brighten up your winter landscape. It blooms in March in Maine, with strongly fragrant yellow, orange, or red flowers. The variably colored flowers last 3 to 4 weeks. It is native to gravelly or rocky stream banks and prefers moist, rich soil, but will grow in average well-drained soil in full sun to part shade. Suckers, or stem growths from the root of the plant, can be pruned out to maintain a neat appearance. Vernal Witchhazel is a dense, rounded shrub, typically growing 6-10′ tall with a slightly larger spread. The large leaves turn an attractive golden yellow in the fall and the color lasts for two to three weeks.

“Native plants are species that either arrived in Maine without human intervention, perhaps thousands of years ago, or originated here. These species of trees, shrubs and wildflowers have evolved over time and developed complex interdependent relationships with other organisms. They are generally better able to meet the needs of regional wildlife species, including butterflies, better adapted to regional growing conditions and easier to maintain than non-native plants.” -University of Maine Cooperative Extension Bulletin #2500.

Why plant natives?

What do you like best about Maine? Is your answer “the coast,” or “the mountains,” or anything related to the natural landscape? The diverse landscapes – rocky coasts with stands of fir and spruce, woodlands of evergreen and deciduous trees, mountains, blueberry fields, rolling farmland, beaches, lakes, rivers – make Maine a special place to live in or visit. Using native plants in your landscape helps to preserve this “sense of place,” this unique quality that sets Maine apart from the homogeneity of many suburban areas in the United States.

When native plants are a major part of your landscape, you are helping to protect and improve the quality of our natural resources by preserving biological diversity. There are complex, dynamic interactions among plants, animals, and their habitats. Native birds, mammals, insects, and other organisms have evolved with native plants and depend on the food and shelter that these plants provide. And plants depend on all of these organisms to aerate the soil, for pollination, decomposition of dead material thereby reintroducing nutrients into the soil, and fertilization. As an example, planting native plants can enhance the habitat of native bees that pollinate crops and plants in gardens, woods, and meadows.

“Biological diversity is of fundamental importance to the functioning of all natural and human-engineered ecosystems, and by extension to the ecosystem services that nature provides free of charge to human society. Living organisms play central roles in the cycles of major elements (carbon, nitrogen, and so on) and water in the environment, and diversity specifically is important in that these cycles require numerous interacting species.” -Dr. J. Emmett Duffy

Some non-native plants can grow faster and larger than they would in their place of origin because of the absence of their native predators and parasites. Plants such as Purple Loosestrife or Japanese Knotweed may form dense stands or masses that push out native plants and diminish the availability of food plants for wildlife. Also, non-natives may also harbor diseases or insects for which native plants have not developed a resistance. This could cause a species to die out in an area unless the plants are treated for these problems. This adds to maintenance time and costs, either in treating diseased plants or replacing dead plants.

“A diversity of native plants will support a diversity of native insects that in turn, support a healthy community of natural enemies that keep them in check.” – from the Wild Ones Journal by Doug Tallamy

There are nearly 1500 species of native plants in Maine. Using those that are appropriate for your site contributes to a healthy, beautiful landscape. Native trees provide shade and structure, and fruiting shrubs provide food for wildlife and add seasonal interest. Groundcovers can replace grass where lawn is not needed, thereby reducing maintenance. Quality of life is enhanced, and often the value of real estate increases as well.