Native Perennial & Shrubs Zone 5

This morning's Wall Street Journal has an article on the front page of the Personal Journal section on the Least Welcome Sign of Summer.

The tall, graceful wands of black bugbane are frequent along North Carolina's Blue Ridge Parkway in mid-July. They blossom at the same time as the tall Turk's Cap lilies, tall bellflowers, and a variety of other showy mid-summer wildflowers. This species is also called black cohosh or black baneberry. In addition to having a handful of common names, black bugbane/cohosh is also known as Cimicifuga racemosa.

The bright red of Indian paintbrush colors our native prairielands, reminding us (through its name) of the Osage, Kansa, Pawnee, and many other people who lived in these prairies before the pioneers.

Ohio Plants -

The flowers of blue-eyed Mary are only about a half inch wide, but this pretty plant makes up for it by usually appearing in abundance, covering a patch of forest floor with little sky-blue and white “faces.”

Bees, butterflies, birds and humans all welcome this graceful summer resident.

Areas of rugged terrain, calcareous soils and secret fens provide habitat for rare species.

Campanula americana, Tall Bellflower or American Bellflower, reaches from three to five feet in height, its blue-violet blooms providing a bright late-summer accent to savanna or woodland plantings. Self-seeding, it is either annual or biennial by habit, seemingly depending on when germination occurs. First-year plants are tight rosettes of heart-shaped leaves that shoot up the following spring to form tall stems. Because Campanula americana is the only bellflower with wide-spread…