Hi everyone! I’m a gardener in southeastern Ontario, Canada. In 2019, I replaced my lawn with paths and garden beds. I grow perennial flowers, herbs and shrubs, and I have a small patch for vegetables. Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a number of spontaneous plants showing up in my garden, including a vulnerable species of sedge (Cyperus houghtonii), and native wildflowers like Lobelia inflata and Verbena hastata. It’s exciting to see that my garden is such a haven for these species! My rule of thumb is not to weed a newcomer to the garden until I know what it is. iNaturalist helps me identify any unfamiliar plants!
Have you noticed this phenomenon in your own gardens? What’s the most interesting or unusual wild species you’ve found in your gardens? I’m not a botanist, so I’d love to know whether there’s any published research on domestic urban gardens as sites of spontaneous flora. I’m assuming there are various forces at play: wind, pollinating insects, small mammals wandering through, etc.
I simply let grow some wild plants in the garden. For example, Echanter’s Nightshade (Circaea lutetiana), Common Hemp-nettle (Galeopsis tetrahit) and Fox-and-Cubs (Pilosella aurantiaca).
The phrase I’ve often heard used for plants that grow spontaneously in a garden, but are wanted (which makes them not weeds), is volunteers. You have volunteer sedges and wildflowers in your garden.
Yes, I’ve heard that word too, but in the context of plants that originate from preexisting plants (such as when tomatoes or foxgloves reseed within a garden). The botanical literature I found uses the word spontaneous to describe plants that arrive from an unknown source. The terminology varies between gardening and botany, it seems!
I have 50 volunteer plant species identified in my garden. Wind, birds, rodents, coyotes, and deer are the facilitators. Coyotes have brought one-seed juniper, which I pulled for allergy concerns, and tree cholla. Goldfinches brought my spectacular prairie sunflowers.
My pleasure! I continue to pack the front yard with as many semi- and true-natives as possible. (My definition is that true natives would grow wild in this exact spot without humans and semi-natives are regionally/climatologically appropriate.) Backyard is more for growing vegetables and relaxing in shade, but it’s also quite messy. You can read more about my adventures and fellow gardeners in this thread https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/monitoring-gardens-and-spreading-the-message/26094
Re: how to spread the word, if you’re on Twitter, Alyssa Harad created a weekly hashtag called (hashtag)FlowerReport. It’s less active now than before Twitter changed hands, but still a nice way to share wildflowers and garden plants each Sunday.
The notion of “mess” in a garden is fascinating to me because it speaks to the value judgements we place on plants, whether wanted or unwanted. These perceptions are so prevalent, even for those of us who like to encourage “wildness” in our gardens! Documenting your garden on iNaturalist seems like a good way to normalize wild plants in cultivated/urban spaces.
Yes, I have. Wound up running into trouble this past year with some plant that looks gorgeous–fine white flowers, intricate leaves, blooms for ever, lots of insects…but the most awful grass burs once it withers. Still don’t know what it was but I’m pulling it is it emerges this year.
As far as cool natives I haven’t seen any I didn’t seed but I’m in the middle of a lot of lawns with a lot of exotic ornamentals so…
I don’t know how, it’s just a shaded garden in very seemingly normal suburbs. There’s quite a few native plants there (some of which I planted and some were planted by the previous owners, who I am told had brought some of those plants as well as soil from their childhood farm in the Driftless Area. Perhaps the morels came from there? Regardless they pop up every year and seem to enjoy their current conditions perfectly fine.
Am I the only one who watches post apocalypse shows and thinks that the overgrown and weed filled towns look amazing to explore? Maybe it’s because gardens tend to be so boring around here and municipal planting tends to be very tame.
No rubber rabbits volunteering here. But my tapestry hedge planted in 2015
Has acquired four volunteers making up more than half of the biomass. One volunteered in place, and 3 volunteers were moved out from the inner garden.
My place in the Dominican Republic was fortunate to have a Royal Palm (Roystonea borinquena) with a series of cavities made by woodpeckers. One of the cavities was a roost for a big fruit bat. I say was fortunate because Hurricane Irma broke the palm off at the cavities. Before that happened, though, the bat’s messy eating habits resulted in a lot of seedlings coming up around the base of that palm. One of those seedlings was a Sea-almond (Terminalia catappa), which was very unexpected on my ridgetop, as it is usually water-dispersed along beaches and riverbanks. Since sea-almonds are an important local foodstuff, I let it stay, especially after the demise of the royal palm.
That “volunteer” or spontaneous sea-almond can be seen in this observation of June Beetles
