Wildflowers by nature don’t often organize themselves into beautiful, gardenlike settings.

There is ferocious competition from other plants, untimely frosts, the unpredictability of rainfall and those pesky deer that like to nibble and nosh their way through the woods.

So, those country cousins to the flowers blooming in the garden often look a bit rough around the edges.

Only a small percentage of Illinois’ more than 2,000 vascular plants (those that have a system for taking up water and nutrients) make their way into the nursery trade.

Of those, only the best, showiest and most colorful are accepted.

“Black-eyed Susans and purple coneflowers are prairie plants that have started here (on the Illinois prairie),” says Pam Niziolek, shrub manager at Green View in Springfield. “And now we have hybridized them and made different selections from the wild, so they don’t look like they used to, but they are essentially the same plant.”

She says wildflowers, over the years, have been selected for their color and growth habits.

“Some are fuller than others and have flowers blooming over more of the plant,” she says. “That’s typically how they are selected – they try to find the nicest one and propagate that one.”

Attractive foliage and disease resistance are other factors in deciding which plants move from the wild to the garden.

When European settlers arrived, they brought plants from home. As time wore on, gardeners imported plants from around the world to brighten their gardens.

Some have been here so long we forget they are not native.

“Dandelions were brought from England because they greened up early, and they used the greens for food,” Niziolek says.

Some native plants never found favor with gardeners and growers because they are hard to start from seed or take a few years to mature and flower.

Penstemons, spiderwort and a few others have made the jump from the brutal competition of the wild to the pampered existence in the garden.

Occasionally, though, nature musters up a show better than any garden tour.

Penstemons colonizing a bluff on private land not far from the Sangamon River put on a spectacular show recently, as did Indian paintbrush dotting a hillside at the Jim Edgar Panther Creek State Fish and Wildlife Area near Chandlerville.

Sometimes no tender loving care is needed – just the time and energy to get outside and find nature’s display.

Chris Young can be reached at 788-1528 or chris.young@sj-r.com.

source : www.sj-r.com