Moisture Loving Wildflowers: Choosing Wildflowers For Wet Climates

Growing wildflowers in your yard or garden is an easy way to add color and beauty, and to develop a native ecosystem right in the backyard. If you have a wet or marshy area that you want to beautify, you can find several moisture loving wildflowers that will take to it like a duck to water.

Growing Wildflowers in Water Prone Areas

Growing native plants is a growing trend in gardening and home ownership. A native landscape helps create and maintain healthy ecosystems and provides habitat and home for wildlife. If you have thought about creating a more natural yard or area of your yard by using wildflowers, you may be stymied by water and wetness.

A native wetland area can support some beautiful wildflowers, though, so don’t give up your dream. Maybe you don’t have a wetlands area so much as a drainage problem. You can work with that too, by planting wildflowers that are well suited to damp soil or even standing water.

Wildflowers for Wet Climates

Wildflowers for wet areas are numerous; you only have to look for them. A good place to start is a local university or horticultural center that can tell you what native wetland plants are in your area. These will work well in your wet areas and will help you create a native ecosystem. Here are some ideas for wildflowers that will thrive in a wet meadow that gets plenty of sun:

• Butterfly milkweed
• Purple coneflower
• Gray-head coneflower
• Anise hyssop
• Prairie blazing star
• Prairie smoke
• Culver’s root

For an even wetter location, including a native wetlands area, try these wildflowers:

• Swamp aster
• Bur marigold
• Marsh blazing star
• Blue vervain
• Smooth penstemon
• Bottlebrush sedge
• Cutleaf coneflower
• Swamp milkweed

Wildflowers and damp soil really can go together, but you can also enhance that wet area with other water-loving plants, like shrubs and trees. Try winterberry holly, inkberry bush, pussy willow, and red and yellow twig dogwood.