Summer Shrubs

When the weather heats up and you wonder what will be there to sustain native insects, it’s always nice to see the summer shrubs kick into gear. Take a walk through my garden and see what shrubs are blooming now and what insects are benefiting from them. Of course, the beauty for us is just icing on the cake.

White meadowsweet( Spiraea alba var. latifolia) has spires of tiny white flowers that attract small bees and lots of beetles like longhorn beetles. The seeds are pretty fertile, and I pot up a number of seedlings for friends and plant sales each year. Read my previous blog about our native spireas here.

St. John’s wort is absolutely a group of summer plants and there are several blooming now or just finished.  Golden St. John’s wort (Hypericum frondosum) is usually the earliest and it is finished now. The star is currently bushy St. John’s wort (Hypericum densiflorum) and a modest side of St. Andrew’s cross (Hypericum hypericoides). All are popular with bumble bees and other bees.

Summersweet (Clethra alnifolia) is aptly named and I’ve got two cultivars blooming now: the pink ‘Ruby Spice’ and the shorter ‘Hummingbird.’  The sweetly smelling racemes are visited by butterflies, bees, and wasps.

Clethra alnifolia

Clethra alnifolia 'Ruby Spice'

Bottlebrush buckeye (Aesculus parviflora) is a shrub that needs a lot of room and sun to bloom well, but I also grow it in part shade where the plant is smaller and the blooms are fewer. The Eastern tiger swallowtails love on this one for weeks, occasionally joined by silver-spotted skippers and large bees.

Tiger swallowtail on bottlebrush buckeye (Aesculus parviflora)

Two of our native azaleas bloom in the summer. Sweet or smooth azalea (Rhododendron arborescens) hasn’t yet found a sweet spot in my yard and is currently in a pot where it only has a few blooms this time of year, but it would be great for other people!  I have too much deer presence to give every azalea a home. Plumleaf azalea (Rhododendron prunifolium) has found a perfect home next to my front porch where it happily sports red flowers on my birthday every year in July and attracts large butterflies and hummingbirds.

Rhododendron arborescens

Rhododendron prunifolium

Aralia spinosa flower cluster full of
different bees and butterflies

Last but not least is a giant of a plant, and not everybody’s favorite at all, the devil’s walking stick (Aralia spinosa). This large shrub is covered with prickles, from the bark to the very large, compound leaves (the prickles are on the underside of the leaves/leaflets). It also has a tendency to sprout from the roots, especially if the root zone is disturbed by digging or if the plant suffers damage (which is what happened in 2014 and I wrote about it). I find these suckers easy to pull out (and not hard to pot up for friends and plant sales). This species creates a huge inflorescence in summer; the hundreds of tiny flowers in it are very popular with butterflies large and small as well as a number of bees. I love to get binoculars and watch to see what visits way up there. It is blooming now!

My previous post on late spring and early summer shrubs can be found here. I hope some of these ideas will inspire you to plant some summer shrubs in your garden.