Jack Monsted

Native plant a day, day 5 - Smooth beardtongue (Penstemon laevigatus). This Southern Appalachian endemic has really nice reddish stems. It grows wild in wet meadows throughout Virginia and the Carolinas.

Day 4 of gushing about random native plants I find - Ohio spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis). Found this guy blooming on top of a Rock outcrop at Shenandoah River SP today. It's shorter than its cousin Virginia spiderwort, and grows in sunnier, drier spaces. Still lovely colors.

Day 3 of sharing a random native plant I find: wild Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) - this little guy is growing in my front yard. I bought it at a small nursery years ago, but it must be a local mountain ecotype because its stature and flowers are much smaller than most garden varieties you find.

Native plant a day: pink lady slipper orchid (Cypripedium acaule)!

Found a bunch of these beauties blooming today up on great North mountain. They tend to prefer acidic soils while their cousins, yellow lady slippers, tend to grow in calcareous soils.

Native plant a day: Ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius) - 5/16/25

1.5 years old, planted in a restored grassland in Northern Virginia. When fenced from deer it grows very fast, even in tough dry soils.

Spring in a photo. Trout lily (Erythronium americanum), flowering on a river bank in Maryland. Maybe my favorite spring ephemeral?

I planted these two redbuds (cercis canadensis) as tiny transplants with only two leaves a few years ago. This year they're finally looking like real trees!

Gotta leave your redbuds trunks multi-stemmed to preserve that natural look.

My home for the next few days. Got about 1000 native plants to pot up!

Spring beauties are up in our woodlands - such delicate little blooms!
These native wildflowers are also called 'fairy spuds' because they produce small potato-like corms in their root system. They're technically edible, but who could bring themselves to dig up such a pretty little plant?

I love how bloodroot leaves kinda hug the stem right when the flowers pop up. Chilly little flower just tryna' warm itself up!

#sanguinariacanadensis #springephemerals #wildflowers #nativeplants

This is where ecological restoration meets art! When clearing invasive buckthorn trees from this native grassland I found they were surrounding a grove of sycamores. Rather than hauling the cut buckthorn stems out to be burned, we used them to build pathway into the grove. #nativeplants #ecoart

Rosette of Virginia bluebell leaves emerging from leaf duff.

Y'all know what time it is. It's bluebell City over here!

Today staff were hard at work removing invasive buckthorn trees to make space and sunlight for the native foxglove beardtongue (Penstemon digitalis) that were being crowded out of the area.
#nativeplants #invasiveplants #ecologicalrestoration

Given 200 years with little disturbance, trilliums and trout lilies will blanket a forest floor, through steady rhizomatic growth and ant-based seed dispersal but it will take that long. Check out Mt. Cuba center for growing advice, they have a great trillium propagation program.

The thing about most spring ephemerals is they are adapted to mature, several hundred year old forests where things only change very, very slowly. So they grow slowly, they disperse slowly, they germinate slowly, and they can't be rushed. You need to be willing to wait 7 years from seed to flower.

Oh shid it's Him!

Medicaid is not for sale.
NASA is not for sale.
The Post Office is not for sale.
America is not for sale.

We have an obligation to resist kings. We outnumber them. And they can be overwhelmed.

Certainly prettier than the metal cages we were using before!

The process of weaving these was rewarding also - feeling the structure get stronger with every added stand. It's the same feeling I get when I plant new meadows, each plant species becomes another strand making the space more resilient.

A dormant shrub in a cage made from woven Rubus stems in a naturalistic woodland garden setting.

My volunteers and I built these cages of bamboo and dormant Rubus stems last year to protect young native shrubs from deer browse. I really like this solution because the woven, thorny stems are not so unlike the natural thickets that would protect developing trees from grazers in the wild.

Christmas ferns (Polystichum acrostichoides) and Cricket (Very goodboy) in the George Washington national Forest!

Christmas ferns are a reliable, flexible evergreen ground cover that grow in lots of different kinds of forests.

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic.

When the fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Oh yeah for sure. I have no hate for tallamy, I've read two of his books. He does a great job at teaching the importance of native plants to lay people, and his work is important for that alone. But to really change things, we need to foster a more personal connection like Kimmerer's. We need both.

I can save one for you if you ever want to swing by!

You're absolutely right. But that's what makes him so popular - most average landowners in America also have a very old-fashioned, European perspective. He's a stepping stone along the journey from that stodgy thinking to the more cohesive, elegant vision Kimmerer presents.

False Boneset (Brickellia eupatoroides) seedlings are starting to germinate in the greenhouse! This native beauty surprised me on the edge of the meadow this summer and I had to collect some seeds to propagate. Some might be for sale at Blandy's garden fair this year! #nativeplants #wildflowers

Thinking about moving towards this also. I wonder if broadcasting the seed along with it's chaff may actually confer an advantage to germination... Like a natural mulch. The few times I've done it I've had great success.

Cool, thanks for the reply. I really like winter sowing as well - artificial stratification is too much of a hassle and too many things can go wrong.

This white oak fell and died in the summer. Now, it still has all its leaves attached while the surrounding living oaks have dropped theirs. This illustrates that dropping leaves in autumn isn't just a passive process - trees must grow a layer of cells at the base of the leaf to 'push' them off!

Interesting approach! May I ask how the seed was prepared and stored? It looks like a lot of shredded plant material in there - curious if that's from the parent plants or was added in after?