Tiny Blooms, Real Punch

I was out in the garden this week doing the thing I always do in July after a long day's work - not weeding, but standing in one spot and just watching, taking it all in - when a thought crossed my mind. The tiniest blooms seem to pack the biggest punch: the mountain mint, the purple prairie clover poking out from between the lavender, and the dotted mint that's just starting to bloom. None of them have one big fancy flower. They're all just a multitude of tiny flowers packed into a single head, working as a unit that seems to be pollinators' favourite destination.

Delicate but tough

This summer has been pretty wild for weather (again - it seems every summer is filled with extremes these days), with heat waves stacked against sudden, heavy rain, sometimes in the same week. These are the kinds of extremes that may make certain cultivated plants sulk. But it's also exactly the kind of extremes that native plants reconcile with, when planted in the conditions they have evolved to grow in.

Take purple prairie clover (Dalea purpurea). You may not have heard of it since it's rather uncommon in Ontario. "Native" doesn't always mean "common here". It's incredibly resilient though, as it sends down a deep taproot and shrugs off heat and drought altogether.

As for dotted mint (Monarda punctata) - it's a true Ontario native - more common than purple prairie clover but still a bit obscure to a lot of gardeners, since you can't find it in any conventional garden centres. It thrives in dry conditions with very little competition: disturbed soils, dry prairies and even roadsides where few other plants can survive.

I can never go without a nod to milkweed - have you heard of whorled milkweed (Asclepias verticillata)? It has fine, needle-like whorled leaves that barely resemble those of other milkweeds, and small umbels of about a dozen tiny greenish-white flowers - it's also a monarch host plant and it's hiding in plain sight with its inconspicuous blooms and delicate foliage. It adapts well to various soil types, from well-drained loam to sandy to rocky, making it a pioneer species in certain environments.

Rain gardens are a good analogy for this year's season so far. In a plant list for rain gardens, I often see listed "plants for wet areas" - but this kind of misses the point of a rain garden entirely. A rain garden isn't wet. It's wet, then bone dry, then wet again, on no schedule at all. Those conditions are a much harder ask of a plant, and it's where species like blue vervain (Verbena hastata) or Virginia mountain mint (Pycnanthemum virginianum) earns their keep as they embrace both drought and flooding once established. A fun question to ask yourself if you're caught without your eyeglasses: "are the tiny mountain mint blooms white? or pink? or pale lavender? Up close (or under a magnifying glass), the flowers are white, freckled with tiny purple dots; from a step back, all those freckles blur into a colour one might have difficulty naming.

Small but mighty

There's real research behind why these clusters of small blooms matter so much to pollinators. A

multi-year Penn State study testing dozens of native species for pollinator attraction found that plants with large clusters of many tiny flowers consistently drew the widest range and highest number of visitors, because one stop lets an insect feed from say, fifty flowers, instead of one.

Mountain mints, specifically, can apparently host over 40 species of native bees on a single plant.

So "tiny blooms, real punch" isn't just a nice way to describe them. It's the very reason why they offer so much ecological value.

To conclude, it can be an interesting thought to hold these multiple little blooms occurring on a single plant against a garden centre cultivar bred for one enormous, doubled, photogenic flower - because that breeding often trades away the very structure that made the plant useful for very little besides seducing us.