Bee Balm Wildscapes

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Bee Balm Wildscapes

Native plant gardens installed and maintained. Contact me today to talk about your vision!

10/02/2026

Are you also sick of mowing your lawn? Do you say "it's way past time I did something else with this space"? Fall is the best time to get your sheet mulching on. Just saying.

Watch this space for about a thousand native plants in the spring. All shade - hello thank you clients for indulging my shade garden obsession. I'm thinking about growing a few species for this client that are easier to grow but harder to find - Solidago ulmifolia, six different shade asters, Asclepias exaltata, Aralia racemosa, Mertensia virginica (tho I didn't have much success with this last year), maybe some Scrophularia, Thalictrum dioicum and Carex grayi for by the downspout. You know, just a few plants.

09/30/2026

A few hundred plugs going in to a client's front yard. Shade gardens are my favorite! You can do some really cool stuff under these mature trees. In a couple years this is going to be full of flowers and life from spring through fall.

09/28/2026

I don't love everything about doing my own business. I've been really struggling this summer with the Big Lonely that comes from it just being me and no coworkers, no one to talk to, no one to celebrate or be sad with or bounce ideas off of or talk about whatever comes to mind. Some days feel like being on the knife edge of happiness. But today it feels good.

09/26/2026

I want to make a promise here that what you're getting is always me. The text is me. The photos are taken by me, of real things. The thoughts are mine. There's no AI here, no generative garbage, no fakery, no fooling. You can trust that what you will get is authenticity.

09/23/2026

3 years of my front yard 'organized' garden! It's been so fun to watch this fill in. And see my vision, uh, not come to fruition. Have I mentioned lately that every native plant garden is a disappointment? Don't get me wrong, this garden brings me a huge amount of joy. But the plants, as always, have a mind of their own.

Going well:
Lots of spring flowers and something is flowering in here pretty much from April through October
Plants have grown and are reseeding nicely, mostly the wood mint but I also see sprouts from a lot of friends. I've encouraged reseeding in this garden by shaking lots of seed heads in to it
Very little weeds. Like, almost none. I've pulled a few dozen shrub seedlings over two years but otherwise have done nothing

Needs improvement:
Needs more flowers in fall: In particular I planted 32 big leaf aster in here initially and they aren't happy and have barely flowered. This year I added 3 or so more aster species to try find one that likes this spot.
Needs more flowers in summer: Added Asclepias exaltata, Agastache foeniculum, some sort of Joe Pye, Aralia racemosa, and probably more stuff that I'm forgetting, just trying to get more summer flowers going and more height variation by the tree
Still not as filled in as I'd like. The reseeding plants are helping a lot but I also added at least 100 more plants to this space this year (mix of home grown and purchased) to try to get it fuller and more dynamic. Truly the best thing you can do for your shade garden is plant as many plants as possible from the start.

Anyway. I love this garden.

09/21/2026

My role model, a beautiful little bluestem growing in a crack in the sidewalk at a clients house. Next time you look at your yard and think "I can't add native plants because too clay-y, too shady, too wet, too dry, too is-a-sidewalk" remember these are incredibly tough, diverse plants that can, with proper selection, thrive in any niche you put them in. Even when that niche is between to chunks of concrete.

09/09/2026

The tight in/the long shot. Obedient plant and brown eyed susans (and friends). Social media will show you a lot of inspirational photos of native plant gardens. I just wanted to share this as an example that one photo is giving you a very small idea of what the garden actually looks like!

Some truths about this garden:
This doesn't have much seasonal variety. Iris blooms in the spring, one swamp milkweed and then this Rudbeckia triloba explosion in the fall. For most of the year this is a pretty boring spot.

It is chaos... it is so many plants. And the R. triloba reseeds like mad. All of the plants in this picture grew from seeds from one plant I planted two years ago.

R. triloba is a biennial. Last year this was all low foliage and no flowers. Next year, who knows!

Physostegia virginiana is a bold choice too because it's a vigorous spreader by rhizomes. So again, this space may look very different next year!

You see one picture, one angle, one amount of zoom, one moment in a season, one year in a garden's life. Everything ebbs and flows, good moments and less good, bright and dark years, variety and monoculture. What is envious one year may be bleak the next. Have patience. Be curious. Love imperfection. Accept disappointment. And be careful about planting either of these species!

09/04/2026

Just a little shady garden moment. Planted this for a client last year and it's looking great. Filled in, happy plants, a few flowers. Now, full disclosure: I planted an identical mix of plants in the back of the property and that area is like... the opposite. Small sedges, plants getting absolutely wrecked by rabbits, no flowers, stuff struggling. Why? I DO NOT KNOW. The reason I visited was actually to pop an extra 30 plants in the back yard. If the client will let me I might add 60 or so more. Gardens...

08/21/2026

Ayyyy and we are back to the sprouting garden! I'm actually quite pleased with this. It's slow and chaotic - it's from seed! That's what you get. But there's a lot of good here. Most of what you see is Oxalis (not something I planted) which germinated with great gusto once competition from the grass was removed. The oxalis isn't a plant I want much of in the final planting, so why am I leaving it?

When you disturb a site (for example, kill all the vegetation with herbicide) you create a wound that the ecosystem immediately tries to heal. The scab is these 'weedy' plant like oxalis that germinate and grow quickly. Later the slower plants (the plants I actually want) will get big enough to shade out the oxalis and crowd it out. It will disappear naturally. If you look under the oxalis you'll see all sorts of other stuff growing, building their root systems, and most importantly being protected from all the hungry rabbits in my yard. By the time they're growing past the oxalis they'll also have enough root structure to handle a little rabbit munching, which would kill them at a smaller stage. I LOVE the oxalis.

08/17/2026

One month of growth on a commercial installation in Fitchburg! This client had a previous pollinator garden in the space that had been neglected for a few years and was overrun with Canada goldenrod - a great pollinator plant but not ideal for the space. I pulled the Canada goldenrod and added a mix of native plants that will fill in quickly and extend the bloom season from April-ish through October. I also planted some adjoining spaces to create a more cohesive look. Some plants (common and showy milkweed, liatris, Joe Pye) were existing but most are new. I can't wait to see how this grows over the next few years (and return to pull the Canada goldenrod resprouts)!

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Madison, WI
53705

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https://www.beebalmwildscapes.com/

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