✨lori✨

Every grocery store in America is selling mums right now. Skip them. They're from Asia, and most of what's sold is bred for the pom-pom look, which makes them mostly useless to pollinators. They're also frequently treated with systemic insecticides that end up in whatever nectar is left. Go for the native late-season heavy hitters. Plant these now and they'll come roaring back next spring: New England aster. Deep purple with a gold center, three to six feet, blooms right through October. Blue mistflower. Fuzzy periwinkle clusters, thigh-high growth, spreads happily. Butterflies swarm it. Goldenrod. Goldenrod feeds migrating monarchs and every bee still working. Sneezeweed. Bright yellow daisy-like flowers with a domed center, blooms late. Doesn't make you sneeze. Joe Pye weed. Tall, dusty pink, and butterflies cover it. Gets big, so give it a back row. Purple coneflower. Pink-purple petals around a copper cone. Starts in early summer and keeps going into fall if you don't cut it. Blanket flower. Red and orange bands with a yellow rim, and it blooms from early summer until frost with almost no help. Thrives in bad soil. New York ironweed. Magenta-purple, tall, and it holds color longer than almost anything else this time of year. Boneset. Seriously underrated. Flat-topped white clusters that get fed on by basically everything, including a lot of small native bees and wasps nobody plants for. White wood aster. For shade, which most fall lists ignore entirely. Blooms under trees where nothing else will. Plant them once and they come back bigger every year, for free.