Scattershot

[mishalak]

When I went for a walk today I scattered wildflower seeds on a recently turned up bit of ground. Penstemon, wild rose, dwarf rabbit brush, false goldenaster, Rocky Mountain beeplant, purple tansyaster, and smooth white aster. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. If I worked and lived in a perfect world with perfect ability to get stuff done I might have put the seeds into little balls of soil before scattering. Still, better planted than getting old in my large stock of seeds. Good luck to them. I am still on the look out for some spots to plant some desert scrub oak (Quercus turbinella) and red hesperaloe (Hesperaloe parviflora).

I have also noted a spot near the sign for my neighborhood that is mostly growing weeds. I think I will try planting some buffalo grass (Bouteloua dactyloides) there. My garden supply is relatively abundant and I can spare five or so pieces and a little weeding time. The rest of my starts will be going to my back yard to start a new prairie lawn since my front yard is nearly finished. I had different plans for a more formal garden, but I think I do not have enough enthusiasm to do laid out beds and everything needed for that. Instead I want to just get it under control, most of the weeds dead, and start planting grass at one edge. More of what I have already had success with instead of trying to do something totally different. Though I may start planting some cultivated plants with the grass instead of only letting wildflowers grow as I do in my front yard. Or perhaps the reverse. Create another pure wildflower display and break the theme of my front yard to being xeric instead of native to my region only.

Comments

[kaffy_r]

I had to tell you how much I enjoyed reading about this. I'm a terrible gardener. but I've reported on people who are advocates for native plantings - for instance, here in the upper Midwest. prairie grasses with tremendously long roots, and flowers, bushes, and trees natie to prairie and nearby ecosystems), rather than plant that have been brought from Europe or Asia.

I've seen their point; many of the introduced trees, bushes. flowers and grass. even the ones I love, don't attract native insect and bird life, and are thus slowly killing those ecosystems. They advocate for rediscovering the gorgeous plants native to any given area, not thinking of them as weeds. which was what European settlers automatically labeled anything that didn't come with them.

tl;dr: I'm glad you did this.

[mishalak]

Oh boy, the the native vs. xeric vs. garden plant thing is an issue I wrestle with a lot. So I have OPINIONS. All of which contradict each other.

The things I love about native plants include:
Needing very little care.
Able to reproduce on their own without my intervention (mostly, there is this plant called the sand lily...)
A plant for every kind of situation.
Attracting an interesting community of pollinators.
Sometimes they are a plant that sez "Colorado!" instead of being something that could be seen in any front yard anywhere in America.

My neutral or mixed feelings about native plants:
Sometimes they can get out of hand. There is this one aster I no longer allow in my yard. Pretty plant, but gosh. Likewise I have complex feelings about my showy milkweed.
Some of them bloom so very briefly that I cannot show them off.

Negative feelings:
Some of them are picky as #3!! My failures with the wood lily are repeated.
Almost none of the native plants are as disease free as a recent introduction as something from far away. There is always something eating on my native plants. Cycle of life and web of everything, but it can make it hard on me trying to make things "perfect".
So far my neighbor who plants everything has a prettier yard than me. He uses a lot of xeric plants, some of them native, but everything he has seems to bloom bigger, longer, and more.

Uncertainly:
Sometimes I wonder if planting natives makes sense in the city. My patch of short grass is sort of a museum piece instead of a working ecosystem. I have to push back against the equilibrium of what is normal for a city. Really, any yard in a city should be a tangled thicket of zombie elms and medium height grasses. There is no fire (or at least not much) or large herbivores to keep the grassland a grassland. Also, what is native? I am growing lovely foothills plants in the shade of my house. And hesperaloe were native to about 1000 km south of here originally, but they do better than many plants on the hot south side on my home.

With non-native plants I have also seen some that seem to drop right into the native food web. The native bees love my garden sage. Also my parsley and thyme. On the other hand the lovely early season crocus and snow-iris seem only to be visited by the honeybees. Also the ice plants seem to mostly be a honeybee plant even though they are from South Africa rather than Europe.

So... complex.

[kaffy_r]

An extremely thoughtful reply. It taught me a new word - xeric - and it was also thorough when you talked about what you liked and didn't like about native plants.

I suspect that the plants getting eaten by everything are exactly the plants your ecosystem wants, keeping alive insects native to your area. But I certainly understand the frustration you feel when you watch your garden turn patchwork with holes, etc. And the specialists I spoke to for my stories emphasized that "native" plants didn't just mean those that didn't come over with Europeans; they often need to be native to the area in which they're being planted. Putting swamp oak in midwestern high prairie, for example, won't work, even though both ecosystems are in Illinois.

One thing the specialists emphasized was that even the smallest piece of native plantings can help save native fauna.

Good luck with every plant in your garden!

[vicarage]

Good for you! Can you post pictures of your "yard" (which of course I think should be cobbled...)

[mishalak]

I have posted one picture and there will be more to follow. Including some of the area that, while not cobbled, is becoming a nice gravel parking area bordered by somewhat wild flower beds.