Crow’s Nest: 50 Flowers

By Daniel Barringer, Preserve Manager. Collage of images prepared by Aubrey Smith. Photos courtesy North Creek Nurseries.

Visitors enjoy the native perennial gardens around our visitor center barn, and one of the purposes of our plantings is to promote the use of native plants in everyone’s home gardens (the better to support the native insects which support local wildlife). The plant labels themselves tend to become obscured as the plants grow each season, so I wondered aloud if we couldn’t have some kind of handout to give people, a guide to the wildflowers of the Crow’s Nest barnyard gardens.

As you can see Assistant Manager Aubrey Smith did a wonderful job of preparing this two-page handout. She purposefully kept the text to a minimum, using only the universal botanical Latin names of the plants. (You can look these names up online for a range of common names, growing conditions, size of plant, and what pollinators each attracts.) She also displayed it in an easy to use and beautiful color-coded format.

Most of the photos (and the plants themselves) came from North Creek Nurseries in Landenburg, Pennsylvania. We are grateful to have permission to use the photos and hope that you use this guide when visiting in the spring, summer and fall. For now, enjoy this splash of color during this winter season of muted tones!