Photos: Prairie Garden

[ysabetwordsmith]

These pictures show the prairie garden.


A bird perches in a tree along the north edge of the prairie garden. It might be a starling.




Looking north into the prairie garden, the sunchokes have dried up. Woodpeckers love to drill these for insects inside the woody stems. Smaller birds cling to the seedheads to peck out the small seeds.




Looking west across the prairie garden, little is visible except the goldenrods.




Amidst the big bluestem patch, a handful of flowers are blooming. In summer, there were blanket flowers and black-eyed Susans here. Now it's blanket flowers and zinnias.




This zinnia is blooming orange.




This zinnia is blooming hot pink.




These late blanket flowers are still blooming.




Goldenrods fill the prairie garden, their silvery seedheads a feast for birds. I often flush finches out the prairie garden when I walk through it.




Up close, the seedheads are very sculptural, with long curls of white fuzz. Late fall and winter gardens are more about interesting shapes than bright colors.




Maple leaves hang overhead, contrasting with the blue sky. This one is almost all yellow.




This one has bits of brown and green along with the yellow.




The notch in the prairie garden has mostly dried up and died, despite my attempts to keep it watered enough. A few zinnias remain, and there's a flush of late-blooming cosmos.




This cosmo is blooming pale pink.




This one is fuchsia.




One of the last zinnias is blooming dusty pink.




Most of the zinnias have already gone to seed.




This one has already been pecked apart by seed-eating birds.




Here's another look at the goldenrods with the light making halos of their fluff.




This mowed strip had the "Towers of Flowers" seed. It definitely did not tower due to the drought. I got a few morning glories blooming though.




This mowed strip had the little bluestem. There were a few turkey feet seedheads rising up earlier, but I don't know if those were from this planting or a previous one, little or big. They didn't seem any shorter than the big bluestem on the east end of the prairie garden.




Blackberry leaves turn red in fall. These are assorted cultivars. What I really want is to find some wild ones, but nobody seems to sell those.




They catch the light like stained glass.




This is another blanketflower.




This is the monarch strip, now all dried out because I couldn't water it.




The path along the edge of the prairie garden is carpeted in leaves.




Sycamore leaves typically turn coppery brown like this. These trees support many types of caterpillars, and thence the birds that feast upon them.




A few have more color, like this one in green and yellow. See the clover peeking through the grass? That's why I don't have to fertilize much. Clover fixes nitrogen right out of the air. That's probably white Dutch clover, but could be something else. We have white, red, and yellow.