Early June Plant Combination Ideas for a Prairie Garden

Despite the beauty and hardiness of native plants, they are still relative newcomers to the garden scene.  Consequently, there aren't very many "tried and true" combinations of native perennials (and/or annuals) that bloom concurrently for the best garden bed displays.

I've been trying to capture combinations that appeal to me when I see them, which is usually a rather serendipitous occurrence.  Here, for example, is a pairing that I found last week, at the Sedgwick County Extension Arboretum in Wichita....

The bluish-purple of the leadplant (Amorpha canescens) blossoms, with their orange anthers, really struck me when I found them in close proximity to the brilliant orange blooms of butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa).  I believe this was an accidental planting - the butterfly milkweed had moved here after originally being planted about 20 feet away, but what a lucky accident!  The leadplant's spiky sprays of grayish, tiny leaved foliage make a nice counter to the rounded mound of the bright green butterfly milkweed, too.  Best of all, these two prairie natives require essentially identical conditions, so where one does well, the other one should too.

Nearby the leadplant-butterfly milkweed pairing in the Arboretum was Husker Red Penstemon (Penstemon digitalis 'Husker Red') planted in front of bloody cranesbill (Geranium sanguineum). 

While I would personally put the penstemon either in back of or beside the cranesbill, the echoes of purple between both plants and the overlapping bloom times, as well as contrasting foliage and plant shapes, made a pleasing combination to my eye.  One of the best things about this combination is that it will do well in part shade, which is rather rare among plants that do well on the prairie.  By the way, the bloody cranesbill is not native to North America, but it's been selected as one of the Great Plants of the Great Plains and there are others in the Geranium genus that are native here.

Some other plants blooming in the prairie right now that could be creatively combined for special garden displays:

Purple horsemint, aka lemon beebalm (Monarda citriodora), an annual that reseeds pleasantly.

Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), a well known, short-lived, garden perennial.

Catclaw Sensitive Briar (Mimosa quadrivalvis), a rather sprawling perennial with classic mimosa leaves and spectacular bright pink flowers.

Spiderwort (Tradescantia spp.), which provide both a nice linear foliage and beautiful blue blooms.

Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriacus), Smooth Milkweed (Asclepias sullivantii), and/or Showy Milkweed (Asclepias speciosa), 3 milkweeds of open grasslands that sport large pink pompoms of blossoms with incredibly sweet fragrance.  Shown in this photo is smooth milkweed growing naturally in a grassland; all 3 species look very similar in general appearance and all 3 are excellent monarch larval plants.  Being good larval plants means their foliage can get quite ratty by the end of summer so planting them amidst a "filler" like aster is probably a good idea.  All 3 will form open colonies.

Purple Poppy Mallow (Callirhoe involucrata), also called wine cup, which brings a strong magenta blossom to the mix.  Its trailing stems can meander between other plants, but in the prairie they often seem to climb UP its neighbors to provide the plant with the sun it needs.  It's not a heavy or a smothering plant, so this can actually work quite well and look very attractive.

Echinaceas, the classic prairie coneflowers.  While Black-sampson (Echinacea angustifolia) is the native here in south central Kansas, there are many other Echinaceas available that will do well in prairie gardens, including Purple Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) and Yellow Coneflower (Echinacea paradoxa), which are both relatively easy to find in nurseries and garden centers.  Pictured here, of course, is yellow coneflower.  Echinaceas are a North American genus.

There are other native wildflowers that are blooming right now, but these are the main prairie forbs that are currently blooming in my yard and gardens.  What combinations would you put together?! 

Serendipitous Garden Combinations

Simply stated, my flower beds can look a bit chaotic.  I love plants, especially native plants, but I love the animals that live on and with them equally as much.  When I come across a new plant, I buy it and figure out where I'm going to plant it later.  If a few seedlings come up, uninvited and unplanned, I'm likely just to leave them where they sprout, rationalizing that they obviously like the conditions there.  If a plant supports a good cohort of insects, I'm likely to let it remain in my garden, even if it sports tattered foliage for part of the year or if the color of its bloom clashes with the blooms around it.  I love my gardens...but I can see how other people might not be quite so enamored of them.

That disclaimer out of the way, occasionally I find unplanned combinations of plants growing in my gardens that really please me, or a single plant that is just simply special in a truly visual sense.  Since this is, ostensibly, a garden blog, I thought I would take a moment and share with you a couple of the "pretties" from my garden during the last month or so.

I find myself absolutely loving this combination of blue sage (Salvia azurea) and sand lovegrass (Eragrostis trichodes) from my front garden bed.  The blue sage in this photo is a horticultural variety that stays shorter and blooms a deeper blue than the standard species.

It was a good year for blue sage - here is the standard wild type out in the front tallgrass area, with Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans) in the background.  Blue sage is beautiful in that setting, too, but something about the airy mist of sand lovegrass seedheads surrounding the vivid blue of the salvia just satisfies me.

Another nice combination I've just discovered this fall is how well bigleaf aster (Eurybia macrophylla) combines with almost anything that is blooming near it.  Here it is snuggling up with summer phlox (Phlox paniculata).

Bigleaf aster is actually native east of the Mississippi, so I'm stretching to call it truly native for us. 
However, it is performing well in dry shade and it's more native than hosta, for example, so I'm starting to embrace it with open arms.  I have a lot of dry shade.

Here it is with brown-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia triloba).  The waning summer phlox are in the background. 

Bigleaf aster is tall - about 3' - and I was not too excited this summer as I watched it gain its full height in leggy splendor.  In fact, if I'd been more on the ball, I'd have cut it sharply back in mid June.  When it started blooming, however, the individual stems gracefully sank down into the surrounding plants, making it look like the single, bigleaf aster plant was significantly broader and shorter than it really is.  With the petioles of the flowers responding to gravity and turning the individual blooms to face upwards, the panicles ended up looking like baby's breath, winding among the stronger blooms of the other plants in the garden - a very nice effect.

I think I've written before about fameflower or rockpink (Phemeranthus calycinus, formerly known as Talinum calycinum), but I really want to show off this clump of it. The foliage looks rather like a rangy version of moss rose or sedum.  Like moss rose, it thrives in poor soil and hot sun, with little water.  I've never had to water it.

The blooms are held 6-12" above the foliage on long, slender stems.  They don't open until the heat of the day; they close as the light weakens in the evening.  The bright magenta color shows up magnificently in the hot, afternoon sun of the summer.  Truthfully, though, it's hard to get a good photo of the entire plant because of the spacial separation between flowers and foliage, but the picture above captures the feeling it leaves me with.  I highly recommend it, although finding it may be a bit of a challenge. 

This plant reseeds a bit, which I truly love.  It's not enough to be a nuisance - in fact, I wouldn't mind if the plant would reseed a bit more frequently.  The seeds must be fairly heavy, because I've never found a seedling very far from the parent plant.  I've transplanted a couple of these seedlings and passed a couple others on to gardening friends; they transplant and reestablish quite readily.  I don't feel like I'm using fameflower effectively yet, but I'm slowly moving my new plants around to see what I can figure out.   Hopefully I'll be sharing some stunning combinations including this plant in future years.

Well, only 3 plants in this post, but it's late and I find myself thinking longingly of bed, so I'll sign off for now.  Hope all your fall blooms are reviving your gardening spirit after the heat of the summer!