Whether you bleed blue or root for the redbirds, use your green thumb to highlight your love for our hometown teams. Garden horticulturist and St. Louis sports fan Tyler Prestien has assembled an all-star lineup for your home garden with a simple theme in mind — local teams, local plants.
While these designs are divided here to showcase team colors, as a true #TeamSTL fan you should consider combining elements of both in a single garden. This combo will keep your garden bursting with red and blue throughout the year.
Click on the photos below to view the stats for each species, and scroll to the bottom to find out more about adding these plants to your garden’s roster.
Cardinals Garden
‘Go crazy folks’ for bright red, yellow, and white flowers celebrating the 11-time World Series champions. The combination of plants featured here will carry your garden from the first pitch of the season-opener to the final out of championship number 12.
Begin by welcoming back redbird baseball with beardtongue, fire pink, and columbine. These flowers bloom in late spring to early summer, attracting hummingbirds and butterflies.
The heat of the summer brings out the best in this garden lineup. There are the baseball-like flower heads of rattlesnake master, or the bright red flower spikes of the aptly-named cardinal flower. Indian pink, black-eyed Susan, wild quinine, and smooth hydrangea round out these summer-loving selections.
Enjoy a return to the postseason (we hope) with the red berries of Carolina buckthorn. Virginia sweetspire will give you showy white flowers in summer, but puts on a clutch performance in the postseason with bright red and yellow foliage lasting late into the fall. As an added bonus, prairie dropseed is a Missouri native grass whose flowers smells like ballpark popcorn when they bloom from August to October.
Grow Your Team Spirit Garden
Looking for some free agent flowers to fill out your home garden? The Shaw Wildflower Market offers the area’s widest selection of native plants. Shaw Nature Reserve also offers a Native Plant School, or you can pick the brain of a Master Gardener by visiting the Garden’s William T. Kemper Center for Home Gardening.
If you’d rather be a spectator, all of these species can be found growing at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Although locations vary from plant to plant, the Doris I. Schnuck Children’s Garden and several of the Center for Home Gardening display gardens are great places to view these native plants in bloom. Shaw Nature Reserve’s Whitmire Wildflower Garden is also a beautiful place to take in Missouri’s native flora.
Cassidy Moody – Digital Media Specialist