Backyard for Bird watchers part 5

Last post, we added shrubs to our backyard design to attract birds. Today, we will finish up the design by adding some perennials and a bench.

We could make the perennial plantings a lot more complicated and detailed then I will be doing here. Since we already have a pretty full plant palette with the numerous trees and quite a few different shrubs we are going to make our perennial plantings pretty simple.

Seedheads as winter bird food

The first plant we will add is a great one for the birds in the winter and the butterflies in the summer, the purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea).

Most everybody knows this perennial but perhaps you don’t know some of the benefits of this great plant. They include:

• easy to grow from seed
• middle summer blooms when flowers from trees and shrubs are rare
• grows in Full sun to Part shade
• tolerant of drought, heat, humidity and poor soil
• rebloom without deadheading
• freely reseed (good because they have a short life span).

The fact that they reseed easily is a problem if you have them in them in one particular spot in your flower bed.

They are better planted in either a mass (such as the photo above) or as a part of a naturalistic intermixed planting where they can move around a bit.

We will be adding them as a massing in front of the Serviceberry. This spot will get plenty of sun for them as it is next to the turf area.

It will look great from the house when in flower and will be far enough from the house that it won’t look that bad in the winter when the flower heads are left standing.

Plant breeders have gotten a hold of echinacea and have come up with lots of different cultivars. These include double flowered ones and ones of every color you could imagine. Skip them all for this purpose. We want the good old species. It’s the best, especially if we are going to leave the seed heads for the birds and reseeding.

If you just NEED more color than the purple pink, we could add black-eyed Susans (Rudbeckias) to our massing.

Adding a groundcover

Now lets add a ground cover plant to add some more interest.

While evergreen groundcovers such as Vinca minor and Pachysandra terminallis can add some nice color and texture in the winter, they are non natives that don’t add anything to our local ecology. They are also often buried under snow in my area so being evergreen is not really that much of an advantage.

So instead, we will choose the deciduous Canadian Ginger (Asarum canadense) that I wrote about a while back as our main ground cover plant. It will provide nice fresh green foliage every spring that will last until fall.

Adding an evergreen

I won’t completely forget about using an evergreen though. We will also inter plant among our ginger, native Christmas ferns (Polystichum acrostichoides). This EVERGREEN fern, is a nice stout performer that adds some green in those otherwise leafless months of December through March.

Ferns are often needy in regards to moisture. This one is not. It likes it’s soil dry to medium moisture. It does require some shade, so we will have to plant it only in shady areas of our design.

The Christmas fern will not spread or naturalize, however clumps will increase in size over time. Overall if you have some shade, this is a great native fern to add to your landscape.

We will add our ginger/fern combo under our redbud, serviceberry grove, and two of our three oak trees.

Adding perennials for the people

Lets finish off our plants by adding two perennials closer to the house not for the birds, but just to make our design more attractive. We will add two “waves” of them near our path between the backy and the side yards.

The fist one is we will add will be Moss Phlox (Phlox subulata). This native mat forming perennial boasts evergreen foliage that is completely covered in mid spring flowers. They look great in when in flower and kind of like a big moss then rest of the year.

The second perennial we will add is an outstanding hybrid geranium that typically grows in a mound to 20” tall by 24” wide. We will plant them in a mass that will bloom for most of the summer. These provide no value for the birds, but lots for people that like color in their yard.

Here is how our design will look with the final two plants added and a bench added in front of the Canadian hemlock trees to watch the action.

Final notes

Here are a few notes/comments that I added to the design:

1. Canadian Ginger should be planted on 1’ centers with Christmas fern randomly placed in the plantings. 80% of the plants should be Canadian Ginger and 20% should be Christmas fern.
2. Scarlet Oak is an excellent shade tree with tolerance for high pH soils, excellent wildlife value and Fall color. It is underrepresented in plantings and should be used more. However, any or all of the three Scarlet Oaks can be replaced with other native shade trees of similar size to increase diversity. Possible examples for my area include Hackberry, Swamp White Oak, and Burr Oak.
3. Bird houses and bird feeders should be added as seen fit.

Let me know in the comments below if you liked this long post series where I develop one design. If so, are there any other types of designs you would like to see done?

Click here for post 1 in this series.