I love to walk\u2014in my neighborhood, my town and wherever I vacation.\u00a0 I never wear headphones or talk on my phone, because I like to save my senses for the small worlds that I encounter on my way.\u00a0 Good suburbanite that I am, I always take stock of the neighbors\u2019 gardens.\u00a0 But I am also fascinated by Nature\u2019s landscaping.\u00a0 I like to see what grows in sidewalk cracks, neglected side yards and highway shoulders.\u00a0 Railroad rights-of-way may be home to loads of trash, but an amazing array of plants fight their way through that.\u00a0 In some seasons, those plants almost obliterate the refuse, fulfilling a biological imperative and doing a public service all at once.<\/p>\n
The sides of the country roads near our summer cottage are home to all kinds of plants.\u00a0 Some are common, including chicory, Queen Anne\u2019s lace, black-eyed Susans and tawny daylilies.\u00a0 Others are great surprises.\u00a0 Last spring, I saw blue-eyed grass or Sisyrinchium blooming on the edges of fields.\u00a0 The tiny, bright blue flowers were a glorious surprise.<\/p>\n
Not long ago, I found an okra plant, with cream-colored, hollyhock-like blooms.\u00a0 Most likely a vegetable garden escapee, it was growing all by itself in what appeared to be a patch of dust on the unpaved shoulder of a county highway.<\/p>\n
About half a mile from the okra, I discovered a clump of blooming Gaura lindheimeri, known simply as \u201cgaura\u201d in the plant retail trade, or, more whimsically, by the common name, \u201cLindheimer\u2019s beeblossom\u201d.<\/p>\n
The roadside clump featured airy, delicate flower stalks that were about two feet tall and waved gracefully in the breeze.\u00a0 Narrow green leaves alternated on the slender stems and the top few inches of each stalk bore panicles of small, pinkish flowers.\u00a0 Like snapdragons, gaura flowers open sequentially, so every panicle was home to a combination of open blooms and unopened buds.<\/p>\n
Gaura lindheimeri is an American native perennial, but its original stomping grounds are in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas.\u00a0 Given that, I suspect that the roadside gaura was another garden escapee.\u00a0 This fits with the textbook description of the species, which states that it naturalizes readily.<\/p>\n
When I saw the gaura flourishing in the incredibly infertile confines of a road shoulder, I remembered that a nearby winery was celebrated for an eye-catching sustainable planting scheme highlighted by masses of pink-flowered gaura and purple lavender.\u00a0 Both plants are pollinator magnets, flourish in dry conditions and beautify the landscape over a long season.<\/p>\n
Gaura is a prairies species, which means that it has a long taproot and doesn\u2019t take well to being transplanted.\u00a0 Prairie soil is thin and free draining, so garden cultivation calls for soil that is well amended with fine gravel or sand.\u00a0 Heavy, moisture-retentive clay will encourage root rot.\u00a0 Soil that is too rich fosters lots of leaf and stem growth, but fewer flowers.\u00a0 All that stem growth ultimately contributes to stem floppiness, which means either messy borders or staking\u2014both frustrating to time-challenged gardeners.<\/p>\n
To sum up, if you have a sunny spot with poor, dry soil, gaura will be the perfect ornamental plant for you.<\/p>\n
So why is such a beautiful and useful plant stuck with an unwieldy species name like \u201clindheimeri\u201d?\u00a0 As is often the case with plant names, \u201clindheimeri\u201d harkens back to a person, specifically nineteenth century German immigrant, Ferdinand Lindheimer, who is also sometimes known as \u201cthe father of Texas botany.\u201d<\/p>\n
The university-educated Lindheimer emigrated from Europe in the early nineteenth century and eventually ended up in the German settlement of New Braunfels near San Antonio, Texas.\u00a0 He spent a large chunk of his working life as founding editor of the New Braunfels newspaper, but his passion was botany.\u00a0 He roamed over swathes of the Texas hill country and beyond, sometimes helped by members of indigenous tribes, gathering and preserving botanical specimens.\u00a0 His work is still celebrated in Texas.\u00a0 The larger botanical world remembers Lindheimer because some 20 plants include his last name in their Latin species names.<\/p>\n
The gaura I found had smaller flowers than some of the cultivated varieties, which are available in shades of pink, white and red.\u00a0 One of the most popular cultivars is \u2018Whirling Butterflies\u2019, with white flowers and a three-foot tall growth habit.\u00a0 For something shorter, with darker flowers and foliage, try \u2018Whiskers\u2019 Deep Rose.\u00a0 Shorter varieties may also work well in deep containers with free-draining soil.<\/p>\n
In many places, there is still time to buy and install gaura before winter.\u00a0 You will thank yourself next spring.\u00a0 Try the selection at Bluestone Perennials, 7211 Middle Ridge Rd. Madison, OH 44057, www.bluestoneperennials.com<\/a>.\u00a0 Free paper catalog.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I love to walk\u2014in my neighborhood, my town and wherever I vacation.\u00a0 I never wear headphones or talk on my phone, because I like to save my senses for the small worlds that I encounter on my way.\u00a0 Good suburbanite that I am, I always take stock of the neighbors\u2019 gardens.\u00a0 But I am also … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3],"tags":[1429,1949,1948,1951,448,737,945,1950],"class_list":["post-2512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","tag-drought-tolerant-plants","tag-ferdinand-lindheimer","tag-gaura-lindheimeri","tag-lindheimers-beeblossom","tag-native-plants","tag-perennials","tag-prairie-plants","tag-texas-botany"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2512","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2512"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2513,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2512\/revisions\/2513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}