evaluating native plants at mt. cuba center, with george coombs
In the early 1990s, when I was working on a book called “The Natural Habitat Garden” with my friend Ken Druse, we traveled the country interviewing native-plant enthusiasts and photographing their gardens. One memorable stop was the home of Mrs. Lammot du Pont Copeland, outside Wilmington, which today is the botanic garden called Mt. Cuba Center, with more than 50 acres of display gardens on more than 500 acres of natural land.
I’d never seen native terrestrial orchids before, or the vivid red and yellow wildflower called Spigelia marilandica anywhere, and that day I learned that some discerning and forward-thinking experts such as Mt. Cuba’s first horticulture director, the great Dick Lighty, were already busy selecting “better” forms of native plants for garden use–a trend that has accelerated and become one of the hottest areas of contemporary plant breeding and selection.
Today, Mt. Cuba is open to the public from April to November part of each week, and also conducts more extensive research than ever: including formal large-scale trials of selected varieties of native plants such as Heuchera, Coreopsis, Baptisia, and Monarda for their garden worthiness, disease resistance and also for their appeal to the insects who have co-evolved with the plain old “straight species,” as the basic version of each
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