Hello from Sunlight Gardens, your premiermail order source for wildflowers, ferns, vines, perennials, and shrubs of eastern North America. We grow hardy, robust plants that will beautify your gardens and support a diversity of wildlife. We can help you succeed by providing you with solid information, a great selection, and high quality plants. Our plants grow! And rest assured that all our plants are entirely nursery propagated. Our goal for 2008 is to grow the best plants for you in the most sustainable way. One way we will conserve natural resources is to reduce the amount of materials we print - including our catalog. We will no longer be printing a full color, glossy, 36 page catalog. Mailing, paper, and ink costs have sky rocketed along with oil and fuel prices. You can, however, download a copy of our full handbook and catalog to your own computer, if you prefer, and print it out yourself. As easy-to-use pdf version will be posted here very soon. So we are now sending out a plant list to current customers and to those who request one. Our 2008 price list will give you a list of all our plants (current as of printing time) along with a graphic display of key characteristics, ie, bloom time and color, size, cultural requirements, and several other attributes. Our web site, however, is current, and you can get full and in-depth information here. Since printing costs and mailing weights are no longer an issue, we can include a lot more informattion to help you make choices. And our site is secure. You can order on-line or if you prefer, you can print an order form or use the one in our price list, and send us your order via snail mail. And for those of you in the states to whom we cannot ship plants due to agricultural restrictions (AZ, CA, HI, ID, NV, OR, UT, and WA), please fee free to download the pdf version of our handbook and study the web site for information purposes. All in all, we hope you will join us in our efforts to use less of our limited natural resources. Let's make this a better place for our children and all the other critters with whom we share this beautiful planet This poem typifies April here in east Tennessee – gorgeous but unpredictable. Two Tramps in Mudtime by Robert Frost The sun was warm but the wind was chill. You know how it is with an April day When the sun is out and the wind is still, You’re one month on in the middle of May. But if you so much as dare to speak, A cloud comes over the sunlit arch, A wind comes off a frozen peak, And you’re two months back in the middle of March. Shooting stars is our featured plant for this month. They are one of those wildflowers that if you are lucky enough to ever see a large patch of them in the wild, they will leave an impression you will never forget. Two sites I’ve seen, did just that. In the first, thousands of plants occupied moist crevices among boulders on a very steep wooded hillside of several acres. At the bottom of the rocks, there was a gravel road and then a large meadow. The shooting stars had naturalized down the slope and across the road where they were scattered about in the damp grass. What a gorgeous place. The other special site was in the Smoky Mountains, in the woods, where there were huge sandstone boulders and limestone sinkholes and depressions. Shooting stars were all over the place, in thousands, clearly perfectly situated in the damp spring alkaline soil in open shade. Nature does have a grand plan. Shooting stars will go dormant by early summer and at this time, their water requirement goes way down. Good companions would have the same water and light requirements, and would NOT go dormant in the summer. |
| This Month's Featured Plant | |
Shooting Stars Wide-ranging in the eastern United States west to Minnesota, Nebraska, and Texas, Shooting Star is a beautiful ephemeral wild flower of rocky, wooded slopes, bluffs, meadows, and prairies. Clusters of flowers, which smell faintly of grape juice, atop one foot stalks appear in mid to late spring above rosettes of bright green leaves resembling smooth, fleshy, leaf lettuce. The white, pink, or magenta petals are reflexed backwards like Cyclamen flowers, with yellow anthers pointing forward, giving the impressing of little stars shooting toward the earth. Flowering lasts for several weeks then gradually the leaves yellow and the plant goes dormant until the next spring. Shooting Stars like partial shade but will tolerate more or less, and moist but well drained slightly alkaline soil. They like moisture in the spring while in active growth and then drier conditions during the summer and fall. Too much moisture then, and they will rot. Although a little slow to get to any size, once established Shooting Stars are long-lived and will naturalize freely. In masses, they are stunning. Try them with Stonecrop, Devils Bit, blue wood sedge, Eared Coreopsis, or Columbine. The eastern type has white flowers and the western type has pink or magenta flowers. click here |
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| Good Companions for Shooting Stars | |
| Carex flaccosperma | Blue Wood Sedge |
| Chamaelirium luteum | Devil's Bit, Fairy Wand |
| Sedum ternatum | Stonecrop |
| Search more lists: | |
| Native Plants | Showy Berries & Fruits |
| Good Fragrance | Evergreen |
| Good Fall Color | Semi-Evergreen |
| New This Year | |
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Our 2008 Price List will be mailed soon Request a Price List by mail or download a .pdf Price List (2.8 megs) Our 2007 catalog is available as a .pdf. Catalog: SunlightGardens2007.pdf (7.9 megs) Order Form: SunlightGardensForm.pdf (80 k) Browse our catalog alphabetically by either the latin or the common name. Match plants with your conditions of soil, light, water and more click here to search All our plant descriptions include the temperature zones in which each will thrive. Look at our Hardiness Zone map to determine which zone number matches your location.
Are deer a problem? These plants are generally not tasty to deer. Drought Tolerant Just getting started? Try something easy to grow. Got a green thumb? Want a challenge? Try something difficult or tricky. Or try something not too hard. |
