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The beauty of woodland wildflowers is
that they exist at all.
- Roger Swain -
see What's
Coming Up #88
Growing a natural habitat garden is
also one of the most important things each of us can do to help
restore a little order to a disordered world.
- Ken Druse -
see What's
Coming Up #53
The garden is like a
hospital: All the plants are on intensive care. Watering,
mulching, fertilizing, maybe even someone chopping off their little
dead heads. In a prairie garden or meadow, the plants are fully
capable of fending for themselves. They require no fertilizers,
watering, or special care, as long as one has selected native
plants to match their soil and sunlight conditions.
- Neil Diboll, Prairie
Nursery -
see What's
Coming Up #101
There are some optimists who
search eagerly for the skunk cabbage which in February sometimes
pushes itself up through the ice, 
and who call it a sign of
spring.
I wish that I could
feel that way about
it, but I do not. The
truth of the matter,
to me, is simply that
skunk cabbage
blooms in the
winter time.
- Joseph Wood Krutch, The Twelve
Seasons, 1949 -
Left: Skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus)
'Tis a strange Forest that has no
rotten Wood in it...
- Benjamin Franklin, in Poor
Richard's Almanack, 1747 -
see
What's Coming Up #89
Wood's not natural mulch for a
woodland garden. Do you see forest trees shatter into a zillion
pieces and fall? No. They fall, then decompose, then spread.
- Janet Macunovich -
see
What's Coming Up #141
Nature's mighty law is change.
- Robert Burns -
see
What's Coming Up #184
Above, left: Butterfly weed, Asclepias tuberosa.
Above, right: Prairie dock (Silphium terebinthinaceum)
and Joe Pye (Eupatorium purpureum).
With names like butterflyweed,
milkweed, ironweed, and Joe Pye Weed, you can be sure these plants
were not named by a marketing person.
- Neil Diboll, Prairie
Nursery -
see What's
Coming Up #95 and What's Coming Up #100
The big break for prairie plants
was when Purple Coneflower went from being a 'Wildflower' to a
'Perennial.' It's our Jackie Robinson!
- Neil Diboll, Prairie
Nursery -
see What's Coming Up #100
Above, left: Prickly pear cactus (Opuntia humifusa)
is native along the Great Lakes shoreline in USDA hardiness zone 5.
Above, right: Prairie native gayfeather (Liatris spicata)
is a favorite for butterflies, and then for seed-eating
birds.
Be careful when burning prairie
gardens and meadows near buildings. Got any idea what the melting
point of vinyl siding might be? I do, because it melted it on my
office! The fire was 40 feet away and under control, but a
big gust of wind blew hot air toward the building, and the next
thing I knew the siding was hanging down off the walls. So be
careful out there!
- Neil Diboll, Prairie
Nursery -
see What's Coming Up #138
Below: The grasses and forbs on
a prairie have roots that delve very deep -- some have been tracked
to 15' depth. Although a tree's roots do not go so deep as the
crown rises or even so deep as some forbs, they do spread out two
or three times as wide as the branches.
The average prairie plant has
about 2/3 of its living biomass underground in the roots. This
storehouse of water and nutrients is like money in the bank for
hard times. Obviously, these are Republican plants!
- Neil Diboll, Prairie
Nursery -
see What's
Coming Up #104
..