Prairie Garden


We're restoring our garden of native prairie plants.



Peg and I have shared an interest in wildflowers since the early years of our marriage, and we developed a particular focus on prairie plants around 1979. In that year that we received a packet of mixed prairie seeds as a gift for joining The Nature Conservancy, and used them to plant a small garden in a corner of our yard. We also attended classes on prairie plants at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum around that time, and I bought a few potted prairie plants at a plant sale at the arboretum, and added them to the garden.

I think it was in 1981 that Peg and the kids gave me a large package of prairie seed from Prairie Restorations Inc. as a Father's Day present, and we expanded the prairie garden to its present size of roughly a thousand square feet, with about 25 or 30 species of native prairie flowers and grasses.

We added a few more species over the years, but during the 1990s a nearby row of Amur maples shaded out the east end of the garden, nearly eliminating the sun-loving prairie plants in about a third of the total area. A significant number of species eventually disappeared from the rest of the garden as well, though many continued to thrive.

A few years ago we had the overgrown Amur maples removed (though we still have a lovely one in our front yard). We cleared the east end of the garden, and last summer I bought seed for about three dozen prairie species (again from Prairie Restorations), and replanted the cleared area (photos on smugmug). The photo above (from 20 June 2007) shows the replanted area in the foreground. The numerous yellow flowers are black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), which is biennial (while most prairie plants are perennial), so it matures more quickly than most of the other species, but will not persist in such numbers.

Somewhere in our disorganized archive of photographic prints is a picture of Janice as a toddler, standing in front of the garden. It must have been 1982, and the expanded garden was at a stage similar to that shown here, with a dense display of black-eyed Susan.

The prairie garden has long been one of my most focused interests, and I've spent quite a bit of time exploring it this summer. I'm collecting some photos that I'll be sharing soon. Also, a few insects in the garden have particularly caught my attention, so I expect to have more to say about them in the coming weeks.

Posted: Sun - July 22, 2007 at 05:09 AM       by email

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