Overlooked Native Plants for the Garden – Perennial Wildflowers in Native Gardens, Part 1

By Lee Gordon Native Garden Committee

This is part of a short series on some of our local native plants that are superb for our native gardens, but which are largely overlooked.

Perennial wildflowers are great for their colorful seasonal displays. In the wild, they grow, bloom with a splash, make seeds, then disappear. Once established, and with irrigation, they bloom more reliably than annual wildflowers. Our prominent designers build their native gardens with roughly 70% foundational evergreen plants, and they tuck perennials into smaller spaces and along the border. This makes for a tidier garden, but it misses what perennials have to offer. Perennials like to show off, and I like to give them some room so they can strut their stuff!

We find perennials blooming all over our open spaces, poking flowers up through a shrub or peeking out from below. My favorite spots are the uncommon places where perennials just take over. These are the sites that make me want the same in my garden.

My garden has two 10’ areas filled with buttercups, checkerbloom, and blue-eyed grass, and they are beginning to light up as I write this in early March. Their color dazzles for few months, then they fade and go to seed, and finally, warm weather dries them up. After that, I trim them to the ground, leave the trimmings as a mulch, and let the ground sit empty until the next growing season. I consider the open ground to be a small price to pay for the perennials’ riotous spring blooms.

I introduced buttercups to my garden, but the checkerbloom and blue-eyed grass were already there. They all create seedlings that keep their allotted space full, and of course, they also pop up elsewhere in the garden. I suppose that when they grow in the wrong place, they are weeds, but I call them my “preferred weeds”. They may not be growing where I had intended, but they sure beat dandelions and scarlet pimpernel, and their color is always welcome. These perennial intruders tend to displace the weeds I don’t like, but they also stay out of the way of my foundation plants. They are easy to weed out if I need to make way for something else.

Most of the perennials in this article are grassland plants. They grow among shrubs in our chaparral and in hillside meadows. In the past, they grew amid native bunch grasses, but they also find a way to grow in the middle of invasive exotic grasses. Grassland perennials also mix it up with one another. It is common to find two, three, or even four of these species all living side by side. Monet would appreciate the color mix.

The three best-established perennials in my garden are buttercups, checkerbloom, and blue-eyed grass:

Ranunculus californicus (buttercups) occupies large patches on grassy hills above Metate Rd. in south Poway. I wanted to recreate these patches in my garden, so I cleared an area and planted about 30 plants. Within a few years, these plants and their seedlings filled the space. A year or so later, I planted the second area with another 30 plants. Buttercups produce upright flower stalks with plenty of bright, shiny yellow blooms.

Sidalcea malvaflora (checkerbloom) moved in to share the first of the buttercup plantings. Checkerblooms bloom a bit later than the buttercups, but there is always a period when both are in full bloom at the same time. I love their complementary colors. Mallows are known for large, clear flowers and checkerblooms are one of our showiest mallows. When they are ready to bloom, checkerblooms send out arching stems upon which the flowers appear, a few at a time, travelling the length of the stem.  

Both buttercups and checkerbloom are rigorously seasonal. They grow, bloom, and dry up, all on a schedule. It does not matter if you irrigate. The good news is that irrigating the dormant plants does them no harm. They reliably return in the fall.

Sisyrinchium bellum (blue-eyed grass) shares the second buttercup planting. As before, the blue and yellow color combination looks great. Blue-eyed grass blooms earlier and longer than checkerbloom and buttercups. The monthly irrigation keeps the plants green even in the summer. There are always a few blue flowers almost any time of the year. Because the plants stay green, I don’t trim them like the others. The flower stalks dry up above the rest of the plants, and then they are easy to pull out by hand.

While the first three perennials are well established in my garden, the next two are works in progress.

Viola pedunculata (Johnny jump up) has long occupied my hill, but unlike the other two, it produces few seedlings here. Years ago, I imbedded rocks to create steps for a pathway up the hill. The pathway became so choked with buttercups and checkerblooms, I could not get through, so I cleared them away. Since then, I have been growing and planting Johnny jump-ups to fill the area around the pathway. They are small, so they do not obstruct the path. This has been a long process because they don’t seed new plants and because they grow slowly. It takes three or four years before they are ready to bloom. They may be small, but they reward you when you crawl down to them to smell the amazing scent of fresh peaches from the flowers.

Silene laciniata (cardinal catchfly) produces striking red blooms relatively late in the season. In open spaces, their flowers rise above shrubs and non-native grasses. There are some that bloom in the shade next to the trail in the Del Mar Mesa Preserve. On a hike there one time, a friend discovered a hummingbird whose tailfeathers were caught in a catchfly’s sticky leaves. He freed it and it buzzed away. Should we call it a catch-bird?

I have been planting catchflys in several areas of my garden for the past several years, and I am encouraged by what I see. Unimpressive first year plants return the next year larger and stronger. A few bloom in their first year, but most wait a year. They are all irrigated, and they stayed green into the fall last year and produced flowers the whole time.

Delphiniums end this article. In comparison to the above perennials, delphiniums are exercises in unrequited love. Delphinium parryi (Perry’s larkspur) and Delphinium cardinale (scarlet larkspur) have both defied my efforts to establish them in my garden, but I include them here because their flowers are magnificent. If you see them blooming in our open spaces, you will not forget them.

I have managed to get Perry’s larkspur to grow and bloom on my hill a few times, but they failed to return the next year. These were sites with summer irrigation, and summer irrigation is said to kill them, so now I am trying to establish them at sites without summer irrigation.

Calscape.org tells us that delphinium care is moderately easy. If you are having success with our native delphiniums in your garden, I would love to hear how you do it.

Part 2 reviews establishing perennials in your garden, including how to find them, how to grow them from seed, and how to keep them alive when you plant them. It also has tips for collecting their seed. The seeds you collect enable you to share your good fortune with friends in the CNPS.