A Cultivated Art Inc.

A little bit of June in the gardens.

Plant names with photos

The nursery is once again open for orders, with over 200 species available at the moment. I also just added several entirely new species listings.
This round includes the regular Blackburn Hamlet and Vanier pickup options, as well as the once-every-four-weeks Kanata, Carleton Place and Perth options.
Happy native plant gardening!

While we can't fit the whole nursery in the car, we packed it 2 to 3 layers deep with seedlings for our sale at tomorrow's Pollinator Appreciation Day event at Fletcher Wildlife Garden, where we'll be joining lots of other nurseries, experts and volunteers who can help you on your pollinator garden journey.

Saturday, June 20th from 10:00 to 2:00

https://wildpollinators-pollinisateurssauvages.ca/activity/pollinator-appreciation-day-2026/

As some of you have already noticed, the plant store is open for the second round of orders.

There are around 170 species available as of the start of this sale.

For those concerned about some of the species still not on offer, there are around 300 Orange Butterfly W**d, 150 Prairie Smoke, a few hundred Field P***y Toes, around 100 bloodroot, over 100 Wood Poppies and many others still coming along.

For those who miss out on the current offering of Wood Phlox, Columbines, Cardinal Flower and Foam Flower, there are between 100 and 250 of each of those which will be available a bit later in the season.

In the mean time, here are some of the lovely plants blooming over the last week in my gardens.

Nursery update:

The store will be opening as scheduled Tuesday evening at 7:30pm but I want to give you all a heads-up that, with the later start to the warm weather than the last couple of years (i.e. a nearly historically average spring) the seedlings and divisions that have been started early in the unheated greenhouse aren't quite ready to make their debut, so the first round of sales will exclusively be plants that have overwintered and spent their spring outdoors.

There will be around 120 species available and they are perfectly in synch with this season and won't require any hardening off.

I'll start moving the plants out from the greenhouse next week and they will be hardened off and ready to go for the next round of sales, starting on May 26th.

Some late emerging species, like all of the Milkweeds and Swamp Rose Mallow, will be ready to go by then as well.

Based on the germination so far, I expect to offer even more species this year than last year, so please don't worry if a species you have been waiting for isn't available right away, there are lots more coming along.

On an unrelated note, I took these photos in my Vanier yard this evening. Plant names with the photos.

For anyone itching to get planting, I'll be offering a limited selection of native plant seedlings this Saturday at the Just Food Farm Seedling Saturday event from 10:00 until 2:00.

Prices are the same as they will be online when the store opens on Tuesday, except (for the sake of making it easier to make change 😆) the prices will include the tax tomorrow for this one in-person sale event of the year.

In addition to $3 and $5 plugs of various species, I'll have several pots of Bloodroot and Wild Ginger available for $5 to $12.50ea

If you can't make it tomorrow, don't worry, the online store will open on Tuesday evening at 7:30pm and even more species will be available later in the month.

I took a short walk through the Perth gardens and a longer walk through the Perth woods yesterday afternoon.
Plant names with photos

The Bloodroot in my Vanier backyard started to bloom this week 🥰
Photo from Monday evening

Nursery update:

I haven't been online much lately but that doesn't mean that the nursery hasn't been busy, quite the opposite in fact.

Pots of winter sown seeds came into the unheated greenhouse on March 30th and are already germinating and being transplanted into their own spaces in plug trays.

Nitrogen fixing species have been scarified, inoculated with their partnering bacteria and sown.

Warm germination species will be sown next week.

Potting up divisions has been going full tilt, with around 800 Pennsylvania Sedge, 250 Blue Wood Phlox, multiple flats of Woolly Blue Violets, Wild Strawberries, Narrowleaf Evening Primroses, Great Blue Lobelia, and Silver Wormwood prepared, as well as several pots of Bloodroot, Canadian Wild Ginger and Sensitive Fern.

We pulled a lot of the mulch off of the over wintering plants in the nursery last week and I started moving the trays back up onto pallets yesterday.

It looks like the survival rates have been really high this year, even for some of the species that don't always make it through the winter in pots, including Cardinal Flower and Scarlet Beebalm.

I'll be at the Just Food Seedling Saturday with some of these, and many others, on Saturday, May 9th from 10:00 to 2:00 and the online store will open for orders on the evening of Tuesday, May 12th.

Given how well the planted that we potted up in the late summer and early fall have come through the winter, I expect to have a pretty extensive availability list on the 12th.