Page last updated on 21 December 2007

Flowers which grow at the edge of the treeline

When it comes to growing flowers up here, I always remembered what I read on some guy's website from Tromso, Norway. He said that a lot of the plants he had success with in Tromso were not supposed to grow where he lived, but when he tried them out they worked well. I'm following his advice.

The first thing I look for is some kind of environmental mirroring between the plant's original environment and the summers here in Galena. Our summers come on very quickly from very cold weather, which means cool soils when the temperatures are 70 degrees. The temperatures remain steady for the first month, but once some kind of twilight or night sets in, the temperatures get cold fast. June is dry; July and August, wet. Our first frost is usually at the end of August. So what I need is something with cold tolerance which grows quickly and can put up with sudden changes in water, temperature, and weather.

One biome with those characteristics is here, of course, but the other one which comes to mind is the Mediterranean biome in the winter. Finicky rain, cool soils, sudden cold snaps. I've found the Mediterranean winter flowers do very well up here in the summer. That's really cool, since there are thousands of interesting annuals from those places.

The best flowers from the Meditarranean biome come from South Africa. They don't mind the dryness of June when they establish themselves, and they don't seem to mind the rains and the cold later on, either. Namaqualand flowers do very well and they are always showy and spectacular.

I've also found, like the guy in Tromso said, that you can plant out of the zone and find pleasant surprises. A lot of zone 3 or 4 annuals seem to grow up here just fine, perhaps because the superlong days give them enough energy for speeded-up growth. I keep looking for perennials, too.