Hardy Prairie Plants, Tough Survivors
Ranked #3,543 in Home & Garden, #42,559 overall
The All American Garden
Especially as the style of a 'New American' garden has caught on in popularity, the usage of these plants has grown by leaps and bounds. Favorite now are rudbeckias or Black-eyed Susans as they are commonly known, and the healing plant, Echinacea, or the Coneflower.
Some are no doubt very familiar, some might be new to you, but let's take a tour through the prairies and find out more about these flowering garden plants..
Caroline Léna Becker
Best Book about Prairie Gardening
One of my all time favorite gardening books!
Gardening With Prairie Plants: How To Create Beautiful Native Landscapes
Amazon Price: $16.94 (as of 06/03/2012)
Covering all aspects of prairies and making prairie gardens. This is the one book to own on the topic.
Grasses
Many varieties are now available in garden stores. Not all are natives. Native prairie grasses might be harder to locate, but easy to grow from seed.
How to Make a Prairie Garden
Is it simple or difficult to create a prairie?
If you would like to create a garden that has the effect of a small prairie, that is simple, and it is easier to care for than most perennial gardens, but if you wanted to restore a prairie to its original state, that can be quite a complex undertaking. In fact, some might say you can't really restore a prairie exactly to its original state.
Greater Prairie Chicken
Why are both these answers true?
A prairie is actually an entire ecosystem, which involves the delicate balance of animal and plant life, and specific events such as prairie fires. These are difficult to reproduce in most suburban or even rural places. That should not discourage you from making your own version of a prairie, however, but just define the process.
For most of us, a patch of simulated prairie, with a small number of our chosen plants and grasses, is the most satisfying way to reproduce the grasslands of the earlier days of America. And should making a facsimile prairie not be the goal, some of these plants are the best and easiest perennials to grow for long bloom and their water conserving natures in our perennial garden border.
Main points to remember:
- Prairies are pretty much treeless ( although there are Savannah areas), and their plants like full sun .
- There were two main types of prairie in the US: the tall grass prairies that grew on wetter ground; and the short grass prairie that was much drier.
- When planting a prairie patch, you must guard against weeds, like in any gardened areas.
- While there is much bloom and variety, a prairie garden is much subtler in effect than a European style flower garden.
Steps to making your prairie garden:
Clear your soil of weeds
Prepare the seed area s you would for any garden: dig, break up clumps, and rake smooth
Sow seeds in spring, plant out transplants
Keep well weeded
In early spring, the garden should be either raked off or mowed down with a lawn mower.
Garden Grasses
Best Grasses to Grow
Prairie Grasses...
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Bluestems, big and little, and Dropseeds are some of the best native prairie grasses to grow. You can also grow switch grass Panicum virgatum, June grass Koeleria macrantha, and Bouteloua curtipendula or Side oats grama as it is known.
If you want to mimic the look of prairie, you can use exotic grasses instead of or as well as the native types. Most of those will need more care and moisture than the native types. Especially the western native types, which are those that grow on the drier western prairie lands.
What is a Forb?
They are the herbaceous plants that grow in a prairie. About 60% of the prairie plants are forbs.
Some of the Most Beautiful Prairie Flowers
Prairie Plants for You To Grow
- Coreopsis
- Baptisia
- Echinacea
- Erigeron
- Eupatorium
- Evening Primrose (Oenothera)
- Gaura
- Goldenrods
- Helenium
- Helopsis
- Larkspur
- Liatris
- Lupines
- Penstemons
- Physostegia virginiana
- Rudbeckia
- Ruellia humilis
The Best Book to Buy for Prairie Gardens
Guidance on creating the look in your yard
Prairie-Style Gardens: Capturing the Essence of the American Prairie Wherever You Live
Amazon Price: $18.69 (as of 06/03/2012)
Hands on advice for creating your garden- get right to the nitty gritty of making a prairie remnant in your own yard. This is the interpretation of a prairie that most of us can aim for in designing our garden.
First and Foremost
The Prairie Garden: Seventy Native Plants You Can Grow in Town or Country
Amazon Price: $11.94 (as of 06/03/2012)
Don't worry if you love the wide open spaces but have a suburban or city yard- you can choose many prairie plants that will look great in your landscape with the help and advice in this book.
Plant by Seed
and save money
Best Forbs to Grow
Forbs are the plants that aren't the grasses, they are plants that we usually simply call "perennials" or biennials, or annuals. While most of the plants you might wish to grow are the blooming ones listed, and which are cultivated as garden flowers, you might wish to include some of the less showy, but interesting forbs that grow in a prairie. Why? One reason is to feed wildlife, and other reasons might include the desire to have a more accurate picture of what a prairie looked like.
If you include legumes, then some of them could fix nitrogen in the soil to help feed the roots of the other plantings.
How legumes work.
Some forbs to grow
Hairy Beardtongue Penstemon hirsutus
Bergamot Monarda fistulosa
Wild Blue Flax Linum lewisii
Stiff Goldenrod Solidago rigida
Hoary Vervain Verbena stricta
Ratibida pinnata
Sisyrinchium campestre - Prairie Blue-eyed Grass
Smilacina racemosa
Rudbeckias are long blooming
Golden Daisy Flowers
'Goldsturm' Black-Eyed Susan - 25 Plants -Rudbeckia
Amazon Price: $34.99 (as of 06/03/2012)
A must for any garden.
A beautiful prairie flower
Sundown Coneflower - Echinacea - Fragrant - Potted
Amazon Price: $12.50 (as of 06/03/2012)
Sunset color of this flower is a standout.
Prairie Impression
Sunset on the prairie! It was haunting, unearthly, lovely.
- Marian Sloan Russell
Another Fine Resource for Prairie Plant Information
recognizing plants in the wild
Tallgrass Prairie Wildflowers 2: A Field Guide to Common Wildflowers and Plants of the Prairie Midwest (Wildflower Series)
Amazon Price: $14.98 (as of 06/03/2012)
There may be times you need to rescue plants from the wild, or perhaps you just want to better identify native plants. This guide is useful.
Do You Love the Wild Prairies?
Like Learning About Prairie Plants?
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Blazing Star
Spires of Midsummer Beauty
Kobold Blazing Star/Gay Feather - 4 Plants - Liatris
Amazon Price: (as of 06/03/2012)
Easy to grow and outstanding in the garden.
Where Did The Prairies Come From?
Where Did They Go?
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It is easy to answer where the prairies of America went, prairies so vast that they were compared to oceans, and the covered wagons that traversed them to Schooners. Those lands that reached west as for as the eye could see were plowed up for crops, and became one of the breadbasket grain producing areas of the world. The will of the farming pioneer with his sod busting plow eventually converted the American prairies into croplands.
... it wasn't long before virtually all of the Great Plains prairie ecosystems had been converted to something resembling, from an airplane, an elaborate game board.
- Allison Wallace
The greater question is where did these grasslands come from? What makes a grassland area?
"The prairies were maintained in their natural state by climate, grazing and fire. Rainfall varies from year to year in the prairies. There is usually a long dry period during the summer months. Every 30 years or so there is a long drought period which lasts for several years. The most famous drought was in the 1930s, when the prairies were called the "Dust Bowl".
The climate of the prairies is influenced by its mid-continental location, and the sheltering effect of the Rocky Mountains. Being located far from the moderating effects of oceans causes a wide range of temperatures, with hot summers and cold winters. Strong winds blow across the endless plains during both summer and winter.
Every one to five years fire would spread across any given area of land. These fires moved rapidly across the land and did not penetrate into the soil very far. They killed most saplings, and removed the thatch of dead grasses, allowing early flowering spring species to grow. "
"Before settlers moved west, the prairies were covered with herds of grazing animals, such as buffalo, elk, deer, and rabbits. These animals increased the growth in prairies by adding nitrogen to the soil through urine and feces, and creating open areas for plants that like to have the soil dug up. Prairie dogs dug huge underground tunnel systems which aerated the soil and allowed water to reach several feet below the surface. "
-from World Biomes site
A combination of climate, grazing animals, and sometimes even man when the Native peoples set the prairies ablaze to encourage good grazing conditions for the Buffalo, or lightning strikes, all of them combined to help create the vast prairie grasslands.
Garden Lenses
Tips, Style Topics, Planting Directions
A Prairie Cafe
Come Back and Sit a Spell
Teel us about your own garden dreams
Is there room for some of the prairie flowers?
Prairie Flowers,...
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Prairie Plant Information List
- Building a Prairie Garden
- Ohio Prairie planting information
- Ornamental Grasses
- Grasses are useful in different types of landscapes, including native, plains and meadow. they add variety to many types of Gardens, including water, Japanese, rock, wildlife, craft, xeriscape, container and others. Ornamental grasses add two elements to the Garden experience that are not readily ob
- Gardening with Native Prairie Plants.
- How to grow native prairie wildflowers and grasses.
- Landscaping with native plants: Minnesota DNR
- A series of five gardens featuring a sample design, an artist's conceptual drawing and a native plant species list. Designs were developed for the Minneapolis and St. Paul metropolitan area; selected species lists may include species not native or appropriate to other locations.
- The Prairie Garden
- Few of us will ever see a true prairie like the pioneers of old had seen, but we still have the plants, and many of those are ideal for the challenging
- North American Prairie
- All about the alpine biome, description, global position, climate, and information on specific plants and animals of this biome.
- Garden Style: The New American Style of Landscaping
- Like grasses and James van Sweden's designs? Welcome to the New American style of landscape design. Strong statements with a modern look and xeriscape sensibilities.
Prairie Garden Plantings
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Little House on the Prairie: The Complete Nine-Season Set (Complete Series + Pilot Episode)
Amazon Price: $168.25 (as of 06/03/2012)
Child's Cotton Print Prairie Style Bonnet Medium--Colors May Vary--Includes 1 Individual Bonnet
Amazon Price: $10.48 (as of 06/03/2012)
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Amazon Price: $238.28 (as of 06/03/2012)
