Prairie plants ideal for

drought weather

Tips from the Weekend Gardener

Jeneen Wiche

Hopefully by now we have gotten some rain, but at this writing we are in a dry cycle. The thought of drought this early in the season weighs heavily on many gardeners, especially after the stress of a late spring freeze. Plants require water in order to thrive but some are less demanding then others which may appeal to you if your goal is beauty with little fuss.
The tall grass prairie of bygone days supported diverse plants in a rather harsh environment. Dry, windy, buffalo-traveled and sometimes fire-managed by Mother Nature, the prairie thrived in spite of it all. The plants of the prairie adapted well with their deep roots and they are making a come-back in home gardens as people become more sensitive to water consumption and pollution from gas-powered equipment.
In the Louisville area, for example, the Air Pollution control district recognizes and encourages home owners who reduce their lawns by expanding their gardens; the Metropolitan Sewer District is encouraging the use of rain gardens and rain barrels to reduce the amount of water that returns to our storm sewers after a rainfall.
The idea is to capture water to be used later in irrigation (the rain barrels) or to direct the flow into gardens that act as basins and absorb the water efficiently (the rain gardens).
The plants that hold up best in these two situations are some of our previously over-looked native species. Many are relatives of familiar cultivated garden plants but prove to be less fussy.
The Dry Prairie
I have just added about a dozen new plants to our five-acre “prairie” out here at the farm.
Margaret Shea from Dropseed Native Plant Nursery helped me select species that thrive in open, sunny, dry spots. The existing plants include warm-season native grasses like Indian grass, switch grass, big blue stem, little blue stem and side oats. These clump-grasses provided the foundation of the prairie. The color in the prairie comes from ironweed, downy sunflowers, milkweed, yarrow, Illinois bundle flower, mullein, Echinacea, datura, and goldenrod, just to name the obvious.
The new additions this spring include the blue blooms of the smooth blue aster. The shrubby habit of this three-foot plant will allow it to stand out among the native grasses. The wild baptisia looks like its garden variety cousin, false indigo, but it blooms yellow. The purple bloom spike of gay feather that everyone enjoys in their butterfly garden has two robust prairie cousins in Liatris spicata, the dense blazing star and L. squarrosa, the southern blazing star. Both reach about three-feet in height.
For some really tall plants in the prairie garden the tall coreopsis is covered in two inch yellow blooms atop an eight-foot plant. And, the six-foot yellow blooming whorled rosin weed manages to bloom most of the summer.
The Rain Garden
The plants in the rain garden tolerate the extreme of wet and dry. The concept behind the rain garden is one that helps reduce the amount of rain water that returns to the storm sewer; it is rerouted to a garden constructed as a sort of basin so it will catch the run-off and be used by the plants instead.
Native plants are a good choice here because of their deep roots and tolerance to the extremes of wet and dry.
The rain garden can be filled with the grassy texture of sedges (carex) and rushes (juncus); the tall blooms of ironweed (veronia) and golden rods, the various eupatorium species (Joe-Pye weed, mist flower and boneset), the compass plant that follows the sun and captures the morning dew in its whorled foliage (ideal for a thirsty bird), and asclepias (all the milkweeds support a variety of wildlife, most notably the monarch butterfly, there are different species with orange, white or pink blooms).

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