Looking for beauty and hummingbirds in your yard? Please see the article at the bottom of this update and share it as widely as possible.
Fall native plant sales are coming!
Native plants are available at native-only and conventional garden centers year-round, but in the spring and fall, vendors come to special sales scattered around the region, making for fun and convenient events.
Help us celebrate native trees this fall
October is Celebrate Native Trees Month. We define “October” very loosely, so if you are putting on any kind of tree-related event this fall, please let us know so we can add it to our web page. The “Tree-mendous Adventures" event below is an example.
In particular, October 26-29 is “Bird Sanctuary Planting Weekend.” We define a bird sanctuary planting as one that includes native shrubs and at least one native canopy tree. How about planning an event around that?
Upcoming events
Tree-mendous Adventures: A Family day of Tree Education and Fun! Saturday, September 7, 11:30 a.m. Rust Library, Leesburg.
Native Trees for Earth Renewal by Jim McGlone. Saturday, September 7, 3 pm. Online.
Captivating Caterpillars Wednesday, October 23, 7 p.m. Online.
Volunteers needed
Plant NoVA Natives has no paid staff, so please take a look at our upcoming volunteer opportunities and sign up to help advance our important mission. Currently we need someone for the Herndon Naturefest on September 29.
Partner of the month: Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy
Founded in 1995, Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy’s mission is to inspire, motivate, and engage people to protect, preserve, and restore wildlife habitat. To achieve this end, the organization educates through programs and field trips. It also leads efforts to restore habitat and to participate in citizen science projects that monitor the health of the local environment. The work of the Conservancy is accomplished by many volunteers and a small professional staff who are united in their conviction that we are stewards of the remaining local wildlife and must act now to preserve what we can for future generations.
Report your native tree and shrub plantings
Please help Northern Virginia meet its tree-planting obligations by reporting your tree and shrub plantings here. So far 16,289 have been reported!
Report your tree rescues
Millions of trees in Northern Virginia are at risk from invasive non-native vines. You can help by saving them on your own land or by volunteering on public land. (Plant NOVA Natives/Plant NOVA Trees only does educational outreach, so all this work is done under the auspices of our partnering organizations or other landowners.). So far, 14,275 tree rescues have been reported in Northern Virginia. Please add your report here.
Next Steering Committee meeting – via videoconferencing – All are welcome. Thursday, September 26, 10:00 am – noon. Check our Event Calendar for future meetings.
This month’s newsletter articles to share. Please use this link for social media.
Native vines for hummingbirds and beauty
Native vines can be terrific additions to your landscape. The most popular one, Coral Honeysuckle, is a hummingbird magnet!
Unlike the non-native invasive vines that we see everywhere killing trees, our native vines seldom hurt them. They co-evolved with our trees and are important members of the ecosystem, attracting numerous and diverse populations of pollinators with their plentiful nectar, feeding many birds from late summer into the winter with their fruit, and hosting the caterpillar larvae of several butterflies and moths.
Their flowers are long blooming, showy, profuse, and often fragrant and remarkably complex. It is their nature to reach for a climbing surface and grow upon it rapidly, which puts their flowering and foliage beauty on full and glorious display.
Native vines grow well in average soil and in dry or moist conditions and are generally easy to cultivate. Some can be a nuisance due to their exuberant growth, but they can all be trained to climb walls, arches, fences, arbors, or trellises, or pruned or sheared for containment. Once trained, they add coverage, privacy, and striking beauty to any space.
Here are five native vines you can plant and enjoy for years to come.
Coral Honeysuckle (Lonicera sempervirens)
Coral Honeysuckle, whose botanical name refers to its evergreen habit, is the hands-down favorite of the native vines for garden spaces and is the official wildflower of Fairfax County. It blooms profusely in the spring then continues to bloom all the way up to November. The hummingbirds in your neighborhood will visit it repeatedly throughout the day.
Crossvine (Bignonia capreolata)
Crossvine is semi-evergreen with stunning abundant blooms and claws at the end of its tendrils allowing it to cling to stone, brick, pergolas, and fences without support. Its green leaves turn purple in the fall. Hummingbirds also visit this plant during its May bloom time.
Virgin’s Bower (Clematis virginiana)
Virgin’s Bower is a fast grower and late bloomer with flowers turning to showy sprays of silky seeds in late summer. It climbs via twisted stems so needs something to wrap itself around to grow such as shrubs, trees, a fence or a trellis. Be careful to distinguish this from Sweet Autumn Clematis (Clematis ternifolia), a highly invasive plant that is sold in conventional garden centers.
Yellow Passionflower (Passiflora lutea)
Yellow Passionflower has interesting leaves and delicate, fragrant flowers that bloom in mid-summer. It is considered easy to control, train, and contain.
Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia)
While it is primarily prized in the landscape for its brilliant red-burgundy fall foliage, Virginia Creeper is a generous provider of abundant food for hundreds of insects, birds, and other animals and a meaningful addition to the landscape.
Some native vines are a little too exuberant for most people’s gardens but are great additions to more naturalized areas. Purple Passionflower, Maypop (Passiflora incarnata) for example, is a beautiful nuisance when it pops up everywhere. The name Maypop comes from the loud “pop” the fruit makes when crushed. Trumpet Creeper (Campsis radicans) is another example. Its flowers are flamboyant and a magnet for hummingbirds, but it is a famously vigorous grower that scrambles over anything it can reach with aerial rootlets that will damage any wood, brick or stone it touches. It is also considered a nuisance.
Finally, there is one notable vine that is native in Virginia but not Northern Virginia: American Wisteria (Wisteria frutescens). Widely sold in conventional garden centers, it has become the substitute for the highly invasive Asian wisterias which are wreaking havoc on our ecosystem, smothering trees and tearing them limb from limb.
For more information on all of these native vines, you can visit www.plantnovanatives.org/vines or visit our native plant guide.
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