Back to the Meadow

My efforts to establish a native plant meadow in my backyard continue. The plot is looking better this year in many respects. Many of the more desireable species have spread or grown larger, and some of the seeds I've collected in the last couple of years have sprouted to add to the stock I bought from my local connection.

I took some photos of it last Wednesday and not much has changed since. Little is in bloom right now, but there are some promising indicators for the rest of the season.

I planted a couple of small columbines last year. One, that did bloom last summer and has spawned a few seedlings, still is very small, but its counterpart that started the year in the same condition thrust up a foot-tall stalk around the end of April and has an impressive crop of blooms.



The established stalks of bottle brush grass are already about three times as large as they were last year, and most have put out multiple stalks.




I really like that stuff for some reason. Even before the bristly seedheads come in, the blood-red joints on the stalk are cool to see.



Other types of grass have this to some degree, but none as fully as the bottlebrush.

Those dark red lengths, evident even in the sprout stage, help me to distinguish the bottlebrush grass from grasses I want to get rid of. I haven't weeded as agressively as I did last year, partly because there are so many new desireable plants springing up beside or among the weeds. There are a number of spots where baby black eyed susans are thick, as here:




The susans have the slightly fuzzy, ovular leaves. The rounded, wrinkly stuff in the center is creeping charlie, garden enemy #1. The charred stalk on the right site is a remnant of my controlled burn at the beginning of April.

Woodland sunflowers are also spreading rapidly--even into my lawn. Here's large cluster of them just in front of my larger columbine. Note the dandelion seedheads plotting their assault on the bare ground to the sunnies' left:



This is a larger swath of the meadow, nicely accented by lilacs.



So far, not much more than a green tangle. But that will change very soon.

Though my aim is to cultivate species native to southeast Michigan (and most are cultivated from locally gathered seeds), all these species have a much larger range, and some of my plants connect me to my favorite parts of it. All my milkweed has grown from seeds I gathered on a bank overlooking the Manistee river near Deward. Last summer I collected seeds from bottlebrush grass I found growing near a favorite access point on the Au Sable mainstream. I like the idea that parts of treasured riverscapes have become living residents of my household.