How to Plant a Prairie, Part 1: Why Grow a Prairie?
Part 1: Why Plant a Backyard Prairie?
There’s been a renewed interest in prairies recently. Particularly in replacing lawns and more traditional, manicured gardens in favor of plantings with more plant diversity and often highlighting varieties of plants that were previously passed over in favor of more showy, floriferous varieties.
We have had an interest in prairie plantings and gardens for a long period of time, having not only both grown up in the Midwest (where the entire region is host to the most spectacular and species-diverse tall grass prairies in the entire world) but also having utilized many of the plants in gardens including perennial sunflowers, goldenrod, coneflowers and grasses in other plantings.
It wasn’t until more recently however, that we decided to plant a backyard prairie. We were focusing on growing cut flowers for floral design and retail sales as well as our more traditional mixed herbaceous border that hosts a delightful mix of trees, shrubs, grasses, perennials, annuals, bulbs and vines to create a year-long display of color and texture and variety. With our milder winter climate, there was far more that we could grow as far as the more tender perennials and annuals - but there was part of us that missed the wildness of the prairie species we had grown accustomed to.
So one day we ended up ripping out our garden beds and started planting a prairie full of hardy, drought tolerant, gorgeous species that were native to our region including sand love grass, switchgrass, little bluestem, clasping coneflower, blanket flower, azure blue sage, purple coneflowers and more - many grown from seed, some purchased-in as plants or plugs - and then let them grow into place.
Fast-forward to today, we have a beautiful, luxurious prairie planting that is not only gorgeous and a pleasure to view but also supports an increasingly diverse population of wildlife and is incredibly easy to maintain and manage.
So much so, that we ended up shrinking our gardens in order to accommodate for more and more prairie plants to the point they now comprise over 50% of our total garden beds!
But why plant a prairie? Is it really as easy as I make it sound? And is it something that I can do? I’ll answer all your backyard prairie questions in the following series of posts!
Let’s start off with why planting a prairie - there are many useful and enjoyable benefits to planting a prairie!
Providing food and habitat for wildlife and pollinators
It’s been studied that the monoculture of grass that lawns have are not only boring, but have other detrimental effects.
Grass is just a plant, but when you’re trying to grow a specific grass in large quantities in a uniform manner, it takes a lot of control and work to do so. Lots of water, lots of nutrients and fertilizer, and a lot of herbicides and pesticides to prevent the lawn from being taken over by other species that would seek to make a home in the lawn. A manicured bluegrass lawn is certainly beautiful to behold and experience in its own right (and is needed in many circumstances - you can’t have hundreds of people walking all over a native plant species or wading through short grass prairies) but it does come at a cost that is borne by the local wildlife.
The sheer amount of diversity that comes from a natural prairie is astounding - hundreds of plants and organisms that have taken millions of years to evolve to achieve a symbiotic relationship all can be found within a square meter of prairie. While we can’t hope to really match that level of diversity, we can increase the diversity of our plantings by planting something other than the turf grass species that are wildly utilized.
These are also plants that provide more than just greenery - they provide food and habitat and shelter for the wildlife present. Take switchgrass for example - it provides a big stand of vegetation that allows for insects and birds to take shelter in and live within, provides the birds with a natural source of food and even allows for native bees and pollinators to overwinter in the hollow stems. Just a single plant of switchgrass is the entire world for a whole host of creatures.
Prairie plants also provide a lot of food sources for wildlife too, including pollen and nectar. Our native milkweed, coneflowers, rudbeckia and bee balm are literally covered in a mix of honeybees, bumble bees, carpenter bees, hover flies, butterflies, wasps and others as they consume the nectar and pollen.
It’s been interesting just seeing the diversity of insects and other wildlife explode as our prairie planting has matured. We are finding birds that we had never seen before - goldfinches that are going after the Maximilian sunflower seed heads come in droves during the winter, perching on the tops of the stalks and pecking at the oil-rich seeds.
We’ve even started seeing a multitude of blue-tailed skins and garter snakes move in after our planting was established as well. I think that just goes to show just how happy the local wildlife is with our little ecosystem of our prairie.
Prairie plants are generally well-adapted to even the most harsh environments
Prairie plants as a general rule have to survive in a pretty intense environment. They are subjected to scorching hot temperatures and high humidity, freezing cold with subzero temperatures and enduring gale-force winds, flooding rains, being frozen solid or buried in snow and even wildfires, and they just shrug it off and keep growing.
It’s for this reason that they do well in the most harsh conditions. The Lurie Garden in Chicago is actually a giant green-roof, with the soil not being more than a couple feet deep which means that the root systems of the plants are extremely shallow and subject to the elements and the extremes of hot and cold and dry and wet, but you wouldn’t know it given as far as how well the plants are growing and flowering there.
We get around 11” of annual precipitation (that’s right - for the entire year) but our prairie plants thrive in this environment because they are well-adapted for it and can survive on little to no rain once established. We don’t find that they have any issues with pests or fungal diseases (unlike some of our other garden plants) and they grow vigorously with little to no assistance from us whatsoever.
They are honestly some of the hardiest, most rugged plants that actually I feel thrive on neglect and continue to just get bigger and better every year.
Prairies composed of native plants preserves native flora
We used to have a lot of prairie that stretched all the way from the southern borders all these way up into Canada.
With development and expansion however, we’ve reduced a lot of our prairie to almost nothing. Where there were once giant stands of major flora diversity that stretched for mile and miles and miles, now these environments and habitats have been broken up into fractured pieces, with many of these areas completely being paved over for housing developments, lawns and commercial development.
As a result, a lot of our native species of plants are being significantly reduced as far as overall population and genetic diversity, which could make them more vulnerable to going extinct and being lost forever.
As a result, we like to grow as many native species in our prairie planting as possible. This ensures that not only are we having a good variety of plant diversity in our prairie, it also means our planting is kind of like a genetic library for native plants and ensures that we’re going to continue to keep native plants established for years to come to ensure that the wildlife that depends on those plants for food sources and habitat will continue to have a place to feed, breed and live for years to come.
For example, azure blue sage (Salvia azurea) is native to our region of the country and does particularly well in our planting - reseeding very rapidly and growing quite vigorously. It’s a bit harder of a plant to come by, and our initial planting had to come from plants that were purchased from a local grower, and is not especially showy.
However, it is important to us because it is a staple food source for native pollinators and bees. If there should be need for azure blue sage plants or seeds, we would be able to provide them and ensure we can continue to preserve them as a species.
Generally provide a lot of good fall and winter interest
Don’t get me wrong, I love all of our garden plantings but the backyard prairie planting has the most longevity out of all of them. Landscape designer extraordinaire Piet Oudolf has changed the gardening and landscape design world because of his focus on texture and structure and winter interest compared to the color and flowers that are the hallmark of traditional gardening.
That’s not to say that prairie plantings don’t have color and flower - they definitely do, and have some of the most colorful and floriferous species that are also commonly grown in traditional gardens such as purple coneflower and goldenrod and heleniums - but they also have great winter structure and presence as well even after the gardening season is over.
A traditional garden with species like perennial phlox, daylilies, roses, hydrangeas and maybe annuals like zinnias and sunflowers generally starts looking ragged as soon as the flowers are done blooming. It’s one of the reasons why those traditional gardens require a lot of maintenance in the form of deadheading, cutting back and staking and trellising and removing dead foliage - the plants involved generally start looking rather terrible after they’ve bloomed.
On the other hand, a prairie can look its most interesting and most beautiful after the flowers have faded. If you take a look at one of Piet Oudolf’s plantings, you can see that the visual interest comes from the spent flowers, seed heads, bare stems and foliage of plants that look completely different from when they were flowering in their prime during the growing season.
Bee balm for instance, has beautiful flowers but it’s real interest for me comes from the wintertime when the petals on the flowers have fallen away and the seed head center is on display as this lovely button-shaped item that stands out in the winter landscape, adding texture and interest when nothing else is going to be blooming or growing for months.
On the other hand, there is the prairie grass little bluestem - it grows with steely blue-green foliage that is beautiful in and of itself for me, but it is at its most beautiful when a major freeze happens and the blue-green foliage suddenly turns into a lovely rusty-orange tinged with hints of purple and fiery red and fluffy white seed heads floating on top of those stems.
It’s one of the reasons that we actually leave our prairie planting upright and I disturbed well into January or February. Not only does it provide plenty of habitat and food sources for the wildlife present, but it is visually stunning to see a giant sea of dark seed heads and grasses leaves and colors and textures in shades of bronze, copper, red, beige, fawn, gold and straw all winter long.
In a traditional garden, most everything would be cut back to the ground after the first frost, but not here - the garden is allowed to stay upright and still be alive and putting on a show for many many subsequent months.
More visually interesting and beneficial compared to lawns
Lawns generally serve one purpose, and that is to make things visually safe and physically safe and predictable for people. Of course there are people who still really like the look of a well-kept lawn (and I can’t help but have some sentimentality for a perfectly manicured lawn with soft and uniform grass - it’s not commonly found in the Southwestern part of the United States) but the lawn’s purpose is to provide a neutral backdrop for people.
They’re not bad in and of themselves, but a prairie planting with native flowering species is going to just be so much more visually interesting than a lawn. With plants of different textures, heights, colors and growth habits it is a visual feast for the eyes - like a giant tapestry full of different plants and flowers.
Prairie plantings also serve as a more structural element than lawns do. While lawns play a role in the visual presentation, they are representing the complete absence of any structure - just flat and unimposing and uniform (incidentally, a lot of mixed herbaceous borders will utilize a long strip of lawn in front of them in order to give the eye a place to rest and have some visual quiet to take a break from the riot of color and texture in the mixed border from all the annuals and perennials).
On the other hand, prairie plantings are much more dynamic in presentation. You have tall skinny plants like Culver’s root and ironweed along with large and bulky plants like compass plant and partridge pea, large sweeps and drifts of transparent grasses like switchgrass and big bluestem, and little visual pops of color with coneflowers and rudbeckia and blazing gay feather, and plants that crawl and spill over edges like wine cups and prairie drop seed.
Sure, it might be a lot to take in for some people, but the sheer visual diversity and beauty present in a prairie planting is just the right type of visual experience for many people. Especially if you can walk into the prairie and experience it up close, it makes for quite the riveting garden planting.
Easier to manage than lawns or well-manicured gardens
So I’ve already talked about the work that lawns and traditional gardens require, but I wanted to go into depth as far as the upkeep on lawns.
To keep a lawn looking its best, it requires a lot of inputs in the form of water and nutrients, pesticides and herbicides and reseeding as parts of it start to die off. Watering is usually automated as far as sprinklers, many people hire a lawn service for fertilizing, doing grub applications and a broadleaf herbicide and reseeding with aeration, but it still is a lot of work for a single plant (imagine if you did the same thing for a plant like purple coneflowers or Indian grass).
If you’re wanting a perfect lawn, these are necessary things. The same thing goes for traditional garden plants like zinnias, roses, dahlias and daylilies - they require a lot of inputs and deadheading and staking and harvesting to keep looking their best. And while I don’t mind doing that (because most of these varieties are being grown for cut flowers by us) they still are a ton of work.
Our prairie planting on the other hand, is quite low maintenance in comparison. We go through in late winter and cut back the plants to around 12-24” tall, scattering the seeds around to reseed and create new stands of plants as well as mulching the rest of the planting with the plant debris (which naturally increases the organic matter in the soil as well as providing a slow-release source of nutrients for the plants).
In the spring, we do a light spot weeding and also check for any plants that need to be replaced. We might additionally move any excess plants that have reseeded or crawled into areas where we don’t want them and move them before the season gets going.
In the summer, we’ll occasionally do some spot watering if we go over three weeks without any rainfall, but once the plants are established they just will naturally continue to grow and develop.
And in the fall, there’s nothing much to do either except enjoy the beautiful fall colors and the blooming of fall flowers like asters .
Once established, the major work of the season is only during the cutting back of the prairie - but the way we have things set up, it’s literally just chopping and dropping the plant debris back to the ground. Super easy, low maintenance, and I like it that way - I feel more like I’m working in harmony with nature as opposed to fighting against it!
Generally need less water, fertilizer and other inputs than a traditional garden or lawn
While prairie plants definitely need to be watered regularly when getting established, the idea is eventually that they will rely mostly on natural precipitation. We kind of have a tough-love policy with our prairie planting - if you don’t make it after the first year, you’ll get pulled from the planting, with the strongest and most well-adapted surviving.
Although we initially did plant them with a bit of a slow-release organic fertilizer (since our soil is so poor in nutrients and completely devoid of nitrogen) over the years we’ve simply continued to allow the natural breakdown of the previous year’s growth to feed the plants and the soil.
We don’t need to use any herbicides or pesticides naturally, and aside from the occasional infestation of a seed-mediated weed (Chinese elms, pigweed and kochia are our nemeses here) we don’t really have any need to fight any weeds or pests. If a rudbeckia gets nibbled by a grasshopper, it’s not a big deal - it’s all part of the experience, and chances are those grasshoppers will need to be nice and fat and healthy so the birds can come feast on them.
We get to do more of what we wanted in the first place - to enjoy the garden
Don’t get me wrong, I love our fussier mixed herbaceous border, our planters and cutting gardens - they bring me a lot of joy and I love being outside and working year-round. But sometimes during late spring and early summer it can feel like a gargantuan task to keep up with sowing, fertilizing, cutting back and turning over beds and staking and deadheading to the point where I don’t even have time to enjoy the garden because I’m exhausted from all the tasks that need to be completed.
The prairie garden however, is probably the most laid-back garden I’ve ever worked in. Yes, there are some tasks that need to be taken care of, but it is far less labor-intensive compared to the other areas of the garden and I am so grateful for that.
The main work that I have to do in the prairie planting is to walk through and enjoy and experience it! It can sometimes be a bit neglected since I’m not having to intensively weed or work on it, which is why it’s the most important task for me to walk through and observe and experience it.
One of my favorite things to do is walk through the plantings in June or July (when all of the flowers are blooming) to be able to experience and enjoy the buzzing of thousands of insects and beneficial pollinators as they feast on the nectar and pollen smorgasbord laid in front of them.
But I also love walking out in the prairie early in the morning and hearing the various native birds call and sing to each other. And the various migratory species come take shelter in the winter, feeding on the many seed heads available to them and the natural windbreak that occurs from the Maximilian sunflower hedge.
It’s the one part of the garden that I have to do very little in except just enjoy and experience it, and for that I am grateful. After all, if you don’t get to enjoy your garden at some point, what is the point of it all?