Phlox
So many lovely varieties!
When I first moved to the Northeast, it was spring, and creeping phlox was in bloom in many of my neighbor’s yards, spreading across flower beds and spilling over retaining walls. That color—bluer than lavender, paler than violets, more delicate than delphiniums, I loved it. Phlox comes in many colors, but the classic for creeping phlox seems to be that pale but rich blue-violet. When I learned it was a native wildflower, Phlox subulata, that clinched it. I had to have some.
At a big box store, my husband and I found some blue creeping phlox and some low-growing campanulas (probably Campanula carpatica) and planted them around a rugosa rose in a semi-shaded part of our garden. Although these non-native campanulas have a reputation for spreading, it was the phlox that took over, while the campanulas disappeared.
In the meantime, I started wanting to emphasize more natives in our garden. Three years ago, when I decided to add more phlox, I discovered it was not at all easy to find the true native. Just about everything available was a named cultivar, so I went with a couple of those.
Phlox nivalis “Eco Flirty Eyes” is a cultivar of a native phlox, which means a plant breeder (the late Dr. Don Jacobs) took cuttings from a specific plant with qualities he found especially desirable, and propagated more plants from those cuttings—clones of a plant found in nature. Phlox nivalis is a trailing phlox that is native from the Carolinas south. It flourishes in hot, dry sites, which accurately describes the parking strip between the street and the sidewalk in front of our house. Although most of the soil on our lot is clay, the parking strip was at some past time amended with sand, which means it drains rapidly, and its placement between the bluestone sidewalk and the asphalt road means it heats up in the summer.
Phlox “Bedazzled Lavender,” the phlox I ordered as a companion to “Eco Flirty Eyes” turns out to be a hybrid developed by Hans Hansen of Walters Gardens, a mix of several native species, including Phlox subulata and Phlox bifida. Phlox subulata, or moss phlox, is native in the Appalachians and up through New York State and Michigan, especially in open woodland areas and, like Phlox nivalis, rocky or sandy areas that stay on the dry side. Phlox bifida, sand phlox, is a native through much of the eastern Midwest from Michigan to Kentucky, and as its common name suggests, grows in similarly dry soils. Once again, I picked a phlox well adapted to the parking strip.
Later. I wintersowed some prairie phlox, Phlox pilosa, not very successfully. I ended up with one plant, which has been slowly getting a bit larger, year by year. It’s supposed to be a foot to a foot-and-a-half tall, but mine has never been more than about 8 inches tall when it sends up a flower stalk. This spring, though, it sent a runner into a shallow temporary ditch and—surprise—grew a supplementary plant with the largest cluster of blossoms yet. I have carefully transplanted it to another part of the garden, keeping as much soil around the roots as possible, and it seems to be doing fine. It’s best, of course, to avoid moving a plant while it is putting a lot of energy into flowering, but that ditch is going to be filled soon, so it was time to rescue the little darling.
All along, I had been under the impression that somewhere in the garden I had woodland phlox, Phlox divaricata, the phlox I had set out to find when I ended up with Flirty Eyes and Bedazzled. P. divaricata is native to most of eastern North America. The most readily available is a cultivar, “Blue Moon,” selected by Bill Cullina of the New England Wildflower Society, from plants growing at its Garden in the Woods in Framingham, Massachusetts. Woodland phlox needs part shade to full shade and moist soil, so it’s a good thing I didn’t plant it in the parking strip, where it would not have done well. It would, however, be lovely in my native shade garden.
These days, the natives Phlox divaricata, Phlox pilosa, Phlox maculata (wild sweet william, a tall phlox up to three feet in height), and Phlox glaberrima (smooth phlox, another tall phlox) are all available as seed. They require wintersowing or stratifying in a refrigerator for 60 days before they will germinate. For people with the patience to wintersow, I think it’s well worth the fuss.
You might be wondering whether a volunteer in your garden is a phlox. Phloxes all have five petalled flowers. If your volunteer looks remarkably like a phlox but has only four petals, it’s dame’s rocket (Hesperis matronalis), an invasive plant that arrived here from Europe in the 1600s. It’s classified as a noxious weed or otherwise restricted in Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Wisconsin. So if you find it in your yard, pull it, and plant phlox instead. Dame’s rocket is easy to pull; the group I found in my yard a few years ago is down to just two plants today, which I will pull and put on the compost pile before they go to seed.