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 in this 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 and are grown with sustainability in mind. Our web 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. You can download our 2010 Price List or request that we mail one to you. Or you can download a pdf version of the last color descriptive catalog we printed in 2007 which has nice photos, lengthy descriptions, and landscape ideas for all our plants. Please read and enjoy! February The month of February is hard on gardeners because you want to plant, you want to garden, but it is perhaps still too cold for many of us to put new plants out into the garden. So we study, think, and plan a little more. Then we succumb to our dreams and place orders for those new plants that we can’t live without. For those of you in the south, they will be shipping soon. For northerners, place your orders but keep dreaming. Your time is still a long way off! 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 that 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 2010 Price List will be mailed soon Request a Price List by mail or download a .pdf file 2010 Price List (8.2 megs) Our 2007 catalog is available as a .pdf. Catalog: SunlightGardens2007.pdf (7.9 megs) Order Form: SunlightGardensForm.pdf (80 k) We've started a gallery for some extra photos we want on the site, take a look! 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. |
