Andrea Moss
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
SaskToday.ca
YORKTON — Local gardener and native plant enthusiast Paula Maier shared her lifelong passion for the natural world during a recent presentation to the Yorkton Horticulture Society, highlighting the ecological importance and personal joy of cultivating Saskatchewan’s native flora.
Maier traces her interest back to childhood, recalling a three-mile bike ride to school where she observed ditch flowers and duck nests. While camping trips later exposed her to various wilderness blooms, a gift copy of the book Wildflowers Across the Prairies served as a turning point, allowing her to identify regional species.
Her initial attempt to establish native species began with grand ideas of transforming her yard into an expansive wildflower meadow. She quickly discovered it was more practical to work within existing garden beds. Today, she grows the majority of her collection from seeds gathered in local ditches, describing the process of trial and error as her “cheap entertainment.”
Maier says native species have evolved complex survival mechanisms over millennia. Many seeds require cold stratification, dampness or physical scarification with sandpaper to break their tough outer coatings. In the wild, birds naturally aid this process through digestion. While some species germinate within days when scattered in autumn, others require multiple years to sprout.
Gardeners must also learn the individual timelines of prairie plants, ranging from early spring ephemerals like crocuses to species that sprout much later in the season. Maier notes that milkweeds surface so late in the spring that she has occasionally accidentally weeded them out as late as June. However, when brought into a home garden, these species tend to grow more robustly because they no longer expend energy competing against aggressive wild grasses.
Attracting diverse insect life
Primary focus of Maier’s presentation was on the symbiotic relationship between regional flora and native insects She said there “is very little native prairie left” and that it is evident in the declining bird and insect populations.
In her own yard, cultivating low milkweed, alum root, black-eyed Susan and gaillardia brought an astonishing variety of bumblebees, solitary bees, hoverflies and butterflies.
The arrival of monarch butterflies laying eggs on her milkweed provided validation for her efforts. Maier emphasized that many butterflies depend on specific host plants to lay eggs and feed their larvae, including violets, stinging nettle, cow parsnip and willows.
“Many plants now grown commercially have been developed to have larger, denser blooms which make it impossible for an insect to forage for nectar or pollen,” says Maier.
She added that some commercial varieties are bred to be sterile, leaving no nutritional value for birds or bugs. Rather than abandoning traditional flowers entirely, she suggested adding a few native varieties to increase backyard diversity, noting that “hummingbirds love fuchsias and delphiniums and ants love peonies.”
Maintenance and ethical harvesting
Addressing common concerns that wild species are overly aggressive, Maier acknowledged that asters and goldenrods spread quickly, while little bluestem, blue grama and blue-eyed grass slowly reseed themselves without becoming nuisances. She said that many popular commercial imports, such as creeping bellflower and bishop’s goutweed, are significantly more invasive. She also cautioned against generic commercial wildflower mixes, which frequently contain seeds that are not indigenous to Saskatchewan.
Maier urges gardeners not to dig up treasures from public lands under the guise of saving them. She urged the crowd to leave native orchids, such as yellow lady’s slippers, blunt-leaf bog orchids and round-leaf orchis, in their natural habitats due to their strict reliance on specific soil organisms.
“Should we dig up plants from the wild? It seems that we always use the reason that we are rescuing them from the ditches,” says Maier, adding that local birds and bugs rely on those wild spaces.
Native plants for local gardens
Saskatchewan gardeners interested in enhancing local biodiversity can consider incorporating these native species into their home flower beds:
Early season and spring bloomers: downy yellow violet, blue columbine, shooting star, cut-leaf anemone, long-fruited anemone, wild columbine, pussy toes ground cover and smooth camas.
Mid- to late-summer varieties: fringed loosestrife, strawberry blite, harebells, rhombic-leaf sunflowers, wild cucumber, meadow blazing star, black-eyed Susan, gaillardia, showy locoweed, blue-eyed grass, lilac-flowered beard tongue (slender beard tongue), alum root, potentilla, sneezeweed, prairie clover, whorled milkweed, Culver’s root and closed gentian.
Native prairie grasses: little bluestem and big bluestem.
For those looking to introduce authentic regional varieties to their property, or simply learn more, resources and species information are available at the Native Plant Society of Saskatchewan website.
