12/02/2025
🌾A lot of people in the area want to sow meadows, but did you know that it is incredibly hard to buy locally appropriate, native ecotype seed?
🌻Ecological integrity is defined as the ability of an ecosystem to maintain its native components, structure, and functions, allowing it to sustain itself and recover from natural disturbances.
To ensure a planting site maintains its ecological integrity, it is crucial to sow the appropriate native species.
🌻Native/ local ecotype refers to plants that have evolved in a particular area and in a particular ecosystem over time. This doesn’t mean planting a species that occurs in an area, but is sourced from populations far away. This means planting both the appropriate species that comes from the appropriate population.
Unless you’re going out and collecting the seed yourself, it is almost impossible to know the seed provenance (geographical location of the parent plant) unless the seller has recorded it.
👉Most large seed companies in Ontario that sell to the public use seed that originates from plants mostly from the west: Minnesota, Michigan, Manitoba, or Alberta - far away from Haliburton. The seeds you’re getting from these companies often include many species that are found nowhere near Haliburton and may not even occur in the province.
👉Many of these species, and I sell some of them, are suited only for replacing less desirable garden plants in a small planting, but not for larger scale restoration/ meadow plantings.
🧩Imagine the landscape as a puzzle. When you damage/ disturb the land, a piece goes missing. Many of us try to replace that piece by using a piece from somewhere else - by planting a meadow full of species that are hundreds of km outside of their native ranges, instead of the piece that actually fits: locally native plant communities.
All of this is known to restoration ecologists, but the resources and seed sources are scarcely available to home owners/ the public.
🌾🌻This is why my long term goal for this region is to work with partners to establish seed orchards that grow local ecotype seed that is appropriate for creating sustainable meadows in the Four Counties region.
👉If you’re wondering what plants are truly native to Haliburton County, the best place to start is Haliburton Flora (1990), an annotated list of all plants of the highlands, available for free online
Link:https://dn790002.ca.archive.org/0/items/haliburtonfloraa00skel/haliburtonfloraa00skel.pdf
If the plants you want to grow in a meadow are not listed here, they should probably be avoided in favour of plants that do occur here.
🌻My hierarchy for native plantings is:
1. Grow locally common and uncommon species first, species that occur either on or adjacent to your site or in the broader area. Use these first if you are planting a naturalized meadow.
2. Add a few appropriate species that occur just outside the planting area (ex Little Bluestem and New Jersey Tea are great additions to a Haliburton planting, but don’t really occur north of Kawartha Lakes).
3. Add a couple of distant natives. These should be restricted to smaller, garden plantings and include species from the Carolinian Zone such as Dense Blazingstar and Grey-headed Coneflower, and species that grow outside of Ontario like Rattlesnake Master or Purple Coneflower. These plants should be restricted to gardens, not used in larger naturalized meadow plantings.
👉🌾🌻When I sowed the meadows at the nursery, I was replacing disturbed areas that were damaged during construction. I first collected seed from plants on and around the property: goldenrods, asters, Black-eyed Susan, evening primrose, Poverty Oats grass, sedges etc.
I then collected a bunch of seed from outside the planting area, from Haliburton county, Kawartha Lakes, Hastings, and Peterborough. This included species that occur in Haliburton but are rare, like Sorghastrum nutans and Little Bluestem and species that occur just outside Haliburton like Tall Sunflower and Frost Aster.
I didn’t sow any species that were not native to the Four Counties area, and I focused on sowing the species that occurred locally first.
The meadows at the nursery are never mown; stems are left all winter to provide cover and food for wildlife, and left to decompose in the spring. To prevent woody plants from establishing, trees and shrubs are removed by hand as needed. For larger meadows (.5 acres and up), you may have to mow the site every 3-4 years to prevent forest succession, but it is very beneficial to allow shrubs like sumac, cherry, meadowsweet, and raspberry to mature and form thickets if you aren’t on a septic.
I’m happy to answer a few questions or to book an in-person or Zoom consultation to discuss this more.
