Spiraea alba - Meadowsweet

Meadowsweet
Spiraea alba

🦋Delightful Pollinator Powerhouses!🐝

These plants are barely known in the gardening world but they are awesome and deserve to be used far more widely in the landscape.

WNC NATIVE. RARE. Delightful puffs of fragrant, fluffy white flowers in late summer attract droves of life. Fall brings pleasing yellow fall foliage. Excellent host and nectar plants for numerous butterflies and attract birds including Red-Winged Blackbirds and Indigo Buntings. Love moist, acidic soil. Great massed, as a border, low flowering hedge, and more.

Perfect for: Butterfly Gardens, Childrens Gardens, Cottage Gardens, Moon Gardens, Native Gardens, Pollinator Gardens, Rain Gardens, and more!

While they can tolerate partial shade, they produce the most flowers in full sunlight. 

Some plant friends of ours in Burnsville mention that this plant has, of all their many plants, the highest diversity of pollinators on it while it is blooming.

🦋Help butterflies & moths: In NC, Host plant for 63 species of moths, host plant for 3 butterflies - Spring Azure, Summer Azure, Mourning Cloak, nectar for 5 butterflies.

🐦Attracts birds: Invite birds to your garden with these native Spiraeas, including Red-Winged Blackbirds, Indigo Buntings, and more.

🐝Help bees - According to the Xerxes Society, these are important plants for our native bumble bees. These plants will also help attract helpful beneficial insects to the garden.

🦌Deer resistant - Once established, they can handle what deer and other herbivores have to dish out.

💧Water lovers! Meadowsweets are found in wet areas, such as along streambanks, and can even tolerate shallow standing water. They are ideal for naturally wet areas of the garden, the edges of ponds, rain gardens, streambanks, and more.

Full sun to partial shade, with maximum blooming in full sun (6-8 hours of direct sunlight).

3-4’T x W.

Zones 3-8, cold hardy down to -40F.

💚Plant Nerd: Numerous Native American tribes have used these plants for a variety of medicinal purposes. One researcher, Jacques Rousseau, documented in 1949 that the Abenaki name for Spiraea alba - whose leaves were sometimes used to prepare a tea-like beverage - literally means "tea leaves" (lé'bag). Modern foragers have been continuing this tradition, noting that it makes a soothing tea similar to chamomile combined with vanilla. The Abenaki tribe, of New England into Canada, have also made herbal teas from Gaultheria procumbens, among other plants. Pretty cool!