Red clover
Its globe-shaped purplish pink flowers make the most beautiful summertime bouquets. The blossoms are a major supply of nectar for the city’s bees and other insects, and the seeds, leaves and roots are an important source of food for birds, squirrels and other small mammals. Clover also enriches barren soil, making it easier for other plants to colonize.
Chicory
Chicory’s electric blue flower is a jolt of colour in otherwise dreary places. It thrives in the most abysmal conditions, too, by roadsides and in dry, rocky soil. Greeks and Italians pick the early leaves for salad (radicchio is a cultivated form of it.)
Coltsfoot
This is the first plant to bloom in spring, its flowers coming right out of the ground, with the leaves following later. Its dense yellow flowers are often mistaken for dandelions. Flies love them. What’s good about that, you might ask. The flies are a prime source of food for birds, who play a pivotal roll in pollination.
Dandelion
Is there a flower more detested than the common dandelion? Now the bane of lawn-lovers, dandelions were once prized as garden ornamentals. They are great for making wine or whimsical crowns. And who as a child didn’t gather bouquets of them for Mom, or blow on their dried puffballs, just for fun? Most important of all, dandelions are a dependable source of nectar for many insects.
Chokecherry
A most overlooked of small trees, the chokecherry is an important food source for birds. Its diminutive flower clusters provide nectar for insects in spring. Its berries are a beautiful, bright red.
Cottonwood
The fluffy white “cotton” attached to the seeds from the female trees blankets city streets in early summer and that has given cottonwood a bad name. But cottonwoods are the tallest trees on the island, the ones with the biggest, widest trunks. Their sturdy branches offer haven to numerous birds and small mammals and provide welcome shade to the city core. On windy days, their leaves rattle almost musically, and on nice days, the greyish-green undersides of their leaves seem to flash in the sunlight.
Epipactis orchid
The broad-leafed helleborine, originally from Asia, is an orchid that’s neither fragile nor tropical nor rare. Its small flowers come in many shades, from green to purple. It was first spotted in Montreal on a slope of Mount Royal in 1893. Now it’s all over the place, in forests, laneways and vacant lots all over the world, anywhere there’s plenty of shade and moist soil. Its powers of propagation are stupendous; epipactis produces at least 50 flowers and tens of thousands of seeds every year. Wasps love it for its nectar, which leaves them in a kind of drunken stupour. (They carry bacteria and fungus spores that turn the nectar into alcohol.)
Hawthorn
Some Montreal neighbourhoods are home to hawthorns that are more than 150 years old, dating back to times when the land was agricultural. They are small trees that are a veritable “food markets” for birds and animals, who love their fruit, nectar and pollen.
Stinging nettle
Touch one, or just brush up against its hairy-looking leaves, and it will sting. But that’s just the plant’s way of defending itself against marauders, human and otherwise. Gardeners yank stinging nettle out at first glance. But it’s a prime host plant for butterflies, specifically showy orange and black red admirals. Adult females lay their eggs on the leaves. Later the caterpillars wrap the nettle leaves around themselves for protection as they grow, readying themselves for their metamorphosis into butterflies.
Wild chervil
A member of the carrot family, wild chervil looks a lot like the better known Queen Anne’s lace. It spreads freely in shaded areas, growing to a height of more than three feet. Its delicate clusters of white flowers are beloved by bees and wasps. The feathery foliage and clouds of white flowers do wonders to dress up even the most derelict of spots in early summer. They are among the first colonizers of vacant land.