botanical society of zoo montana

HOMESTEAD GARDEN

"A Look into Our Past"

This area located by the Homestead House and barn area will be another focus for 2020. The gardeners cultivated heirloom and old-fashioned flowers in the area that people have enjoyed for many years keeping the tradition of a turn-of-the century buildings.

Be sure to check out the Koi Pond, Lily Pond and Iris Garden located behind the house.

FLOWER HIGHLIGHTS of the HOMESTEAD GARDEN

To see other plant varieties of the Homestead Garden be sure to visit our Botany Page

Heirloom Flowers

Antique flowers from +50 years ago

The Homestead Garden offers visitors a fabulous view of unique, high-quality flower seeds and plants, specializing in old-fashioned fragrant flowers, open-pollinated annuals, bee friendly flower seeds and plants, flowering vines, and rare annuals and perennials. Many antique flowers are hard-to-find heirlooms, passed from one generation to another. The goal of the Botanical Society is to make certain every generation can enjoy the blossoms that were grown yesterday and long before that.

What is an Antique Flower? Antique, or heirloom flowers are open-pollinated seed varieties that originated fifty or more years ago. Open-pollinated flowers are fertilized by insects, hummingbirds or wind, and the resulting seeds will produce plants that are identical or very similar to the parent plant.

See how many you can find in the garden.

Hosta (Funkia) is a genus of plants commonly known as hostas, plantain lilies (particularly in Britain) and occasionally by the Japanese name giboshi. Hostas are widely cultivated as shade-tolerant foliage plants. The genus is currently placed in the family Asparagaceae, subfamily Agavoideae,and is native to northeast Asia (China, Japan, Korea, and the Russian Far East). Like many "lilioid monocots", the genus was once classified in the Liliaceae. The genus was named by Austrian botanist Leopold Trattinnick in 1812, in honor of the Austrian botanist Nicholas Thomas Host. In 1817, the generic name Funkia was used by German botanist Kurt Sprengel in honor of Heinrich Funk, a collector of ferns and alpines; this was later used as a common name and can be found in some older literature.