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The Deep Middle


Gardening & writing in the prairie echo

Gardening With the Wrong Prairie Plants

11/21/2020

3 Comments

 
I've been thinking a lot lately about how we choose garden plants; it's almost always about how the plant looks. And one thing that happens is a gardener may choose a native that isn't meant to live a long time, but when it dies it leaves a hole and the gardener feels like they have a black thumb in year two and three. This happens a lot with early-succession plants, or colonizers.

I'm thinking about Ratibida pinnata and Rudbeckia hirta. The former is a short-lived perennial meant to vanish over time when it's in a thick, naturally-layered and resilient bed. If you use it on its own there are many problems: it's too tall (flops) and too open (weeds can easily compete underneath). In a tallgrass prairie it's one of the first plants to move in but won't stay around in large numbers until the area is disturbed, often via fire.

Rudbeckia hirta is more like a biennial, with basal foliage the first year that's good at weed suppression, and in year two it flowers but by late summer is getting leggy and / or dying back in ugly fashion. So if you have an open garden bed, Rudbeckia looks great for a while, and it will even reseed, but you have to wait two years to get a similar show again, and by then weeds are back and the bed may look lopsided.

And maybe a big part of the issue we have with plants like the above is that we tend to treat them as static, sculptural individuals. These plants evolved to grow in a rich, lush, layered, dynamic, ever-changing landscape. A traditional garden bed is too often the opposite -- specimens placed individually apart from others in single layers with wood mulch meant to look the same for a decade. For example, if you put a grouping of Ratibida pinnata (a tall plant) behind a grouping of shorter Asclepias tuberosa, it's going to 1) look weird and 2) behave in ways detrimental to the health and longevity of the bed. Those Ratibida are going to slouch over the Asclepias and fade away. These plants did not evolve in this kind of community.
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This drift of Rudbeckia hirta occurred only one time -- in the second year of this meadow.
One way to rectify the situation is to bring in sedges -- Carex radiata, Carex praegracilis-- or some bunchgrasses like Bouteloua curtipendula and Schizachyrium scoparium. What we're doing is building the layers and community, creating some buttresses for the taller forb, and ensuring weeds will have no long-term foothold or new space to move into. It's also going to look so much better -- fuller and more uniform in all seasons.

If you walk into a prairie it's more likely you'll see small groupings or even smatterings of individual Ratibida and Rudbeckia. Now, in a home garden where it's critical to up the aesthetic show, we can bring in more of each species in larger masses -- but we still absolutely have to have the main component of the wild community they came from, plant layers underneath and alongside, especially the grasses. We can up the layering and seasonal show even more by including Callirhoe involucrata, Liatris punctata, Pycnanthemum tenuifolium, Baptisia minor, and Solidago flexicaulis -- all weaving in and out of the sedge and grasses like we'd see in a prairie, but brought down to scale and floral impact for the home garden. If we don't have those other forbs in the mix, then in a few years (if we're dependent on the Ratibida and Rudbeckia) we'll have few to no flowers at all.

So let's bullet point the above:
  • Choose a diversity of plants from the same wild plant community.
  • Include plants from various functional layers: groundcover, mid height, tall architectural.
  • Have roughly 50% of the bed in sedge and / or bunchgrass.
  • Plan to replant early-successional colonizers in a few years if you want them to stay around.
3 Comments
Colette
12/5/2020 11:44:27 am

Thanks for this reminder. I'm in Alberta so a very different climate than you. However, we have a native ratibida. And yes, it is very floppy. I have it planted with natives June grass, slender blue beard tongue, Canada rye and others. I like it but will apparently need to plant more to keep it in my yard. I'm enjoying your blog, thanks for all you do.

Reply
Benjamin
12/5/2020 04:23:49 pm

Different climate an ecoregion, sure, but I bet we share a lot of plants. Sounds like you have a nice plant community going already.

Reply
Maria
3/6/2022 11:46:52 am

Thank you for another thought-provoking article. For 25 years I lived next to a restored prairie in Minnetonka, Minnesota, and I would watch some of my favorite plants - e.g., asclepias tuberosa - move around, or disappear altogether. I knew that plants wandered, but it didn't occur to me that they were supposed to disappear!
On another note, I'd love to hear you address the problem of garden center and yard-gardening waste - all the plastic bags, bottles and pots - and brand new plants that nobody knows much about long term (e.g., might they turn out to be invasive?!?). I'm old enough to remember my mother buying struggling with winter cold and summer heat and drought, and buying seedlings in paper flats, kind of like egg cartons. She would have benefited from all the cultivars now available to Minnesotans - but I do wonder about the true cost of these lovely, hardy plants that come in black plastic containers. Thank you!

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    Benjamin Vogt's thoughts on prairie gardening in Nebraska. With a healthy dose of landscape ethics, ecophilosophy, climate change,  and social justice.

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