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How to Tastefully Prairie a Small Garden Bed

3/25/2019

If you don't have 40 acres, let alone 1/4 acre, but yearn to bring an echo of prairie home to a tiny space, all is not lost. There are a few key strategies to use when you have something like 100 square feet or less.

Limit you species list. Trying to cram 15 or 20 varieties into a small space will make it look wild and messy in short order. Aim for around 5 species.
Those species should be behaved clumpers -- they don't run rampant by roots or toss out tons of seed that germinates easily even asphalt shingles.
Select a base layer or living green mulch; I suggest sedge since there is always a species for sun or shade or wet or dry or clay or sand. If you've got 100 feet to work with you might try 50 sedge to start.
That leaves you with 4 plants of the 5 in your small garden, and these will be ornamental flowers most likely. Look for 1-2 that bloom in each season -- spring, summer, fall. With each flower place them in groups of 3-5 or so, assuming they don't get too big (it's ok to have one that gets wider, but only one in the whole bed). Grouping makes the garden seem more together and creates a brighter beacon for pollinators.
Keep those plants short. A small garden that's super tall is just begging for a mower, but one that's 2-3 feet tall looks more approachable and intentional.

So let's say you have 100 feet in half sun to full sun with clay soil that's dry in summer but moist in spring and fall. What might your plant selection look like?

50 plains oval sedge (Carex brevior) -- green mulch (plant on a grid 12 inches apart)
15 nodding onion (Allium cernuum) -- bulb that slowly duplicates in drifts, blooms mid summer (three clumps of 5)
9-15 prairie alumroot (Heuchera richardsonii) -- superb contrasting foliage, blooms in mid to late spring (groups of 3-5)
9 pale purple coneflower (Echinacea pallida) -- small footprint with fuzzy leaves and outstanding winter seed heads, blooms in early summer (groups of 3)
3 meadow or rough blazingstar (Liatris ligulistylis or aspera) -- architectural spikes with winter interest, blooms in late summer to early fall (group of three / two and one)
1 aromatic aster (Symphyotrichum oblongifolium) -- shrubby aster, blooms in mid to late fall

Something else you may notice about this plant list are the bloom colors -- they are essentially different hues of one another. That will help tie the space together and not visually overwhelm while still providing a succession of blooms in the growing season, and yet each one will appeal to a different set of adult pollinators while most are also host plants for larvae.

So there you go, a designed pocket prairie that's better than daylily or lawn or wood mulch and will get you ready for that winning lotto ticket and a new 40 or 400.

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Stop Gardening by Hardiness Zone

3/18/2019

10 Comments

If our goal is to garden for wildlife and the ecosystems they depend on, then we need to eschew hardiness zones on plant tags. But if we do that, how can we know if a plant is suitable for our landscape? We can garden by ecoregion.

The USDA not only offers a hardiness zone map, but several ecoregion maps. Ecoregions focus on plant communities, and this will mostly if not entirely mean the use of native plants adapted to your region and the wildlife that live there. Let's compare two maps -- first what we're used to, then where we probably need to go.

Above is the map we're all familiar with. It's incredibly helpful when matching plants from other parts of the world to our gardens, but as a lot of us know these plants may not be recognizable (or of use) to local fauna like pollinator adults and insect young. Another obvious issue is what's native, even in the U.S.? A native plant from South Carolina has the same zone as a native from Oregon, but the two regions -- their weather, their wildlife, their ecological communities -- will be radically different for the most part. When we're trying to garden with plants best adapted to our locale and the wildlife, we need a different map.

The USDA provides several ecoregion maps, from level 1 to level 4, the latter which is pictured above (it's far more detailed and specific than level 1). If we look at eastern Nebraska where we're located, there are a few ecoregions. When we try to use plants endemic from one ecoregion we'll be more likely to have success not only in plant health and performance, but in wildlife support; this will be especially true if we can find plants grown from local ecotype seed -- that's seed gathered from within the ecoregion, sometimes even well inside that ecoregion on a hyper-local level of less than 50 miles.

You're maybe thinking, ok great, now how do I find what's native to me? Here's what we suggest, which is based on the more in-depth presentation Starting Your Native Plant Garden:

1) Consult with regional plant lists created by The Xerces Society, Pollinator Partnership, and Audubon.
2) Once you have some plants you think might work on your site, further match them on the county level via a search at either BONAP or the USDA.
3) Then learn how the plants reproduce and their further cultural information. For much of the Plains and Midwest, we rely on a few sources to gather and collate horticultural details: Prairie Moon Nursery, Illinois Wildflowers, MOBOT, and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. There are many others, for sure, including regional native plant societies, nurseries, county extensions, and books, like Field Guide to Wildflowers of Nebraska and the Great Plains as well as Jewels of the Plains.

So that's how you start, and if the journey seems complicated or long then that is ideal since you will learn so much more about your region and climate and wildlife than you ever dreamed possible -- and applying that knowledge to garden design and management will be a very good thing, indeed. Prairie up.

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Can Exotic Plants Help Pollinators Adapt to Climate Change?

3/6/2019

4 Comments

Climate change is altering our world in massively unpredictable ways, which will lead to severe cascade effects eroding biodiversity and ecosystem function. Earth will look and act differently thanks to our privilege and short shortsightedness. Plants already bloom at different times, and insects who sync their life cycles around those plants will soon be left with less food to feed themselves and their young.

But using exotic plants to extend the bloom season is a strategy rife with issues that got us into this whole climate change / mass extinction scenario in the first place. When I hear a designer promoting exotics as a way to help pollinators, I know they're missing information. Here are some issues that come up for me:

1) Exotic plants help both invasive insects and primarily generalist pollinators (native or not). Chances are invasive insect thugs evolved with the exotic plants we're using in our gardens, so all we're doing is helping them out, either with the plant being a host for their young or for the nectar and pollen they need. Exotic plants also appeal primarily to generalist adult native pollinators, like bumble bees or many butterflies. Often someone will say something like "I saw a bee on my snowdrops or hosta or russian sage" without knowing what the species is, and in turn what role that species has in the ecosystem.

2) Take oligolectic bees, which evolved to use the pollen of specific native plants to feed their young. Without that plant's pollen we don't have that bee. As an ecosystem loses these specialist bees other specialists are forced to become generalists, which reduces pollination rates of plants. Further, climate change is reducing the pollen protein levels, among other nutrients, so even if the right plants are available at the right time, they may not be as valuable.

3) Helping pollinators by extending the bloom season with exotic plants ignores the plant's critical role as a host for larvae. Exotic plants may help some generalist adult native insects adapt, for a time anyway, but they won't help plant-dependent species or the ecosystem adapt. Simply put, climate change is happening so fast now most life can't and won't adapt. We're looking at a 50% total planetary species loss by 2100. You can't assume exotic plants are going to make much of a difference, especially when they aren't supporting young. Native plants support many times the insect biomass as compared to exotics. But should you be using native plants from an ecoregion south or downhill of you? I don't know. Again, the climate is altering so quickly and unpredictably that the help you may be doing could be short-lived at best.

4) Predicting the future isn't easy, and while we can make some logical guesses, how do we know if / when an exotic plant will become a problem plant? Especially in the face of really unpredictable climate and weather fluctuations? Isn't assuming we know better what got us into this mess in the first place?

I think when we hear that any flowering plant can help pollinators what we're really hearing is a defense of human supremacism; the idea that in whatever garden choices we make will do SOME good on SOME level, so let's pick what's pretty or functional to us as the primary or sole motivation. We are so far beyond this limited viewpoint which eschews empathy, compassion, and scientific knowledge of how the world works. If we keep defending our plant choices in distorted ways, we're simply continuing to feed the system and conditions that have fostered the sixth mass extinction. Our privilege doesn't give us the right to use any plant we want -- it gives us the wisdom and responsibility to see beyond ourselves into the ecosystem and the thousands of lives interacting with our homes (and us) every day. The real world is not a human one, culturally or biologically, and until we start to see nature and landscapes as something part of us -- not just a tool or an artscape -- gardens will fail to wake us to a more profound community of nature, to compassion, and to empowerment.

4 Comments

The Deep Middle

How to Tastefully Prairie a Small Garden Bed

Stop Gardening by Hardiness Zone

Can Exotic Plants Help Pollinators Adapt to Climate Change?

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Archives

Original Archives

1,257 posts from

July 2007 - May 2017

Garden Timelapse

The Deep Middle

How to Tastefully Prairie a Small Garden Bed

Stop Gardening by Hardiness Zone

Can Exotic Plants Help Pollinators Adapt to Climate Change?

About

Archives

Original Archives1,257 posts fromJuly 2007 - May 2017

Garden Timelapse

Original Archives

1,257 posts from

July 2007 - May 2017