The Shortgrass Prairie Garden

[mishalak]

(Do let me know if the image is too big or breaks things. I am just getting back into posting on Dreamwidth since Tumblr became too stupid to use. I shall eventually move this post to a date of 2018 when I took it. There is going to be a lot of back posting things here as I rejigger stuff from my Tumblr at http://veni-vidi-vinca.tumblr.com/ to this blog thingy.)

At the request of a great many people (one) I shall be showing off pictures and explaining my villainous theory of gardening. One of the qualities of a villain is having a huge burst of enthusiasm for a project and eventually tapering off to laziness and/or boredom. Semi-natural plantings are perfect for this since once established they do a lot of caring for themselves. In my shortgrass prairie garden, for example, the buffalo grass stays under about 10 cm of height so it requires no mowing, hurah! It does only look that perfect green in the spring and fades a bit even with adequate summer moisture, but it needs much less than grasses from climates wetter than Colorado's front range. If I were trying for a planting like this much east of Kansas City this probably would not work for a lazy gardener unless the soil drained much more freely than even the sandy loam in my bit of earth.

The very impressive flowers are shell leaf penstemons (Penstemon grandiflorus). They are native to only the far eastern bits of Colorado, but they do well with no more care than moving the few that seed themselves in inconvenient locations. Like many penstemons they are short lived, but reseed themselves very freely and will come up through the buffalo grass to an adequate degree.

Comments

[kaffy_r]

Those are gorgeous flowers, and in my favorite color, too. When you say they're short lived, are you referring to the entire plant, or just the blooms?

[mishalak]

Mostly about the plant. The flowers will last two-ish weeks. The plants last about three years with the first year just being building up to blooming in the second and third. They prefer to sprout in bare soil, but produce enough seed to come up through lite ground covers like pussytoes or buffalo grass which have times when they are thin.

[kaffy_r]

So, not an annual, but not a perennial in the way I've tended to think of perennials.

[mishalak]

Exactly so. They are sort of an extended biennial. First year building, second year blooming, third year more blooming, year four maybe blooming again if they did not exhaust themselves or get a disease.

Many, many wildflowers follow this sort of blooming cycle out here in the west. The garden pansy can be a bit like this too where it is not so cold that it dies during the winter. Grow and bloom until exhausted.

[kaffy_r]

Thanks for teaching me something new!

[boxofdelights]

Lovely!

[mishalak]

Thanks

[threeringedmoon]

Lovely.