Color Clash: Where Do I Go From Here?

I'm not normally the sort of gardener who obsesses over clashing colors in my flower beds.  In fact, I'm rather an "anything goes if I like it" sort of person.  However, I find myself being challenged by color clashes in my front yard this spring.

Specifically, I have a couple plants that I absolutely adore:  downy phlox (Phlox pilosa), a beautiful soft purplish pink bloomer that goes from December through June, and Indian pinks (Spigelia marilandica), a graphically spectacular bloom of bright red with yellow highlights.  For better or worse, because I love both of them, I planted both of them in my front flower bed...pretty close to each other.

And they clash.  Even to my eye, they clash.  (The phlox is on the left, the Indian pinks are on the right, and a Darrow's blueberry is in the middle.)

I guess I figured that one of them wouldn't do so well, leaving just one for me to enjoy, but they fooled me!

Now I have a dilemma.  Which should I transplant, if either?

The downy phlox provides great color for months AND it stays low.  It blends well with foliage of the Darrow's blueberry subshrubs (Vaccinium darrowii) that are also doing well in that bed and with the spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis) and the blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium) that bloom spectacularly in the front gardens during the spring.

The Indian pinks bloom for a much shorter period of time than the downy phlox, but I have a special place in my heart for them.  I've tried them unsuccessfully in both my Mobile and in my Clearwater, Kansas, gardens, so having them do well here is exciting.  Truthfully, I'm a little scared to transplant them and risk watching them wither in a different spot.

The first time I saw Indian pinks was on a garden tour in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where they provided a thick, blooming carpet on a shady hillside.  I've never forgotten that spectacular sight.

While the Indian pinks clash with the downy phlox (and truthfully with the Darrow's blueberry too), they look great with the native columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) that seems to have found a happy home in my garden where it has started to seed itself about a bit.

So far the columbine hasn't seeded itself close to the downy phlox, but it would clash, too, if they grew in close proximity.

So, fellow gardeners, any thoughts?  I won't promise to follow your advice, but I value it nonetheless!  Maybe your thoughts will help me clarify my own.....

Acceptable and Unacceptable Changes to the Neighborhood Landscape

At the beginning of June, we will have lived in this house for 3 years, although I didn't start gardening in the yard until the fall of that first year.

This is what the front yard looked like in mid April, 6 weeks before we moved in....

While the yard was neatly trimmed and mowed back then, I found it sterile and boring.  Naturally, when I began gardening, I started adding native plants and removing non-natives.  As usual, I had more of a general idea of what I wanted the garden and yard to be, rather than any firm plan.  Most of all I just wanted my yard to be a small wildlife refuge in the midst of suburbia.  And I wanted it to be pretty, too, if at all possible.

I kept the huge canopy trees, a southern magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) and a laurel oak (Quercus laurifolia).  They are both native and, while I probably wouldn't have chosen either species to put in their spots, they add gravitas and presence to the yard.  Besides 3 dwarf yaupons (Ilex vomitoria) and a few of the lawn weeds, they were also the only native plants growing in the front.

Since those first days, I've added a laundry list of natives to the front gardens, including shrubs (oakleaf hydrangeas, Virginia sweetspire, sweet pepperbush, dwarf Florida dogwood, wax myrtle, Darrow's blueberry, and a deciduous holly), ferns (southern shield fern, leatherleaf fern, and southern woodfern), perennials (columbine, blue eyed grass, golden ragwort, little brown jug, lyreleaf sage, Indian pinks, Walter's violets, woodland phlox, downy phlox, garden phlox, green and gold, Louisiana iris, mouse-ear coreopsis one, mouse ear coreopsis two, spiderwort, Gaillardia, Florida scrub skullcap, golden zizia, bluestem goldenrod, showy goldenrod, regal catchfly, powderpuff mimosa, dense blazingstar, native lantana, white Baptisia, butterfly milkweed, and fogfruit), and even a grass (Elliott's lovegrass).  I'll spare you all the scientific names - this time!

Here's a recent photo of the front yard....

Only now are the garden beds beginning to show up and look like gardens.  "A year to sleep, a year to creep, a year to leap."  The old maxim holds true yet again.

Having added such a wide variety and large number of plants, it's odd to me what people notice and comment about in my front gardens.  I had a neighbor tell me how much she liked the "yellow flower", golden ragwort (Packera aurea), shortly after I planted it next to the sidewalk, under the magnolia. 

Ironically, I love the foliage of this plant, which is low, dark green, shiny, and rich looking to my eye...but I don't particularly care for the flowers.  I do love their cheerful presence early in the growing season, though.  Golden ragwort are the first native flowers to bloom in my garden. 

Recently, a woman who came by to pick up wild strawberry plants I was giving away commented how much she liked my columbine and blue eyed grass.  That made my day!  She even knew the names!

Here's one clump of the blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium) she was admiring, by the front porch, ...

...and a closeup of blue-eyed grass blossoms in the shade nearby.

Then here's a picture of the other species she was admiring, eastern red columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), taken a couple weeks ago when it was first starting to bloom.

As much as I love blue-eyed grass and columbine, I am surprised that no one has ever mentioned my downy phlox (Phlox pilosa), which I think is beautiful.  A tidy mound of cotton candy pink at the front of the flower bed, this classy little plant blooms nonstop from December through to the end of May and even into June.  Perhaps to most eyes it just looks like a standard annual bedding plant?

The spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis), which is spectacular right now, doesn't get much mention either - although another neighbor has started telling me when he sees it popping up in wild areas around the neighborhood, encouraging me to go dig it up and add it to my gardens.  Since he lives 2 doors down from me, I figure he must like it at least a little or he wouldn't be encouraging me to plant more.

In particular, though, one plant has caused unexpected reactions:  powderpuff mimosa (Mimosa strigillosa), a relative of catclaw sensitive briar, for those of my friends who garden in the prairie.  Greg loves groundcovers, so we thought we'd try putting this low growing plant, with its pretty foliage and its blooms that look like sparkling pink pompoms, up front.  We are encouraging it to spread out and fill in the hell strip between the sidewalk and the street.  To our eyes, it's prettier than weedy grass any day! 

Ironically, no one seems to notice the blossoms (which are, in my opinion, very cute and very hard to miss), but the foliage makes people uncomfortable - superficially it looks too similar to chamberbitter (Phyllanthus urinaria), a.k.a. gripeweed, a common lawn weed down here.

Unfortunately, I inadvertently played into this concern by planting the first two powderpuffs at the base of a newly planted wax myrtle.  I didn't take the time to clear a large, carefully delineated "bed" for the powderpuff to spread into.  I've done my best to keep the grass weeded out of the spreading groundcover, and the powderpuffs have filled in marvelously well...but there isn't a defined edge to help people "read" this part of the landscape easily.  That was a mistake on my part.

I'm going to keep working on the powderpuff, but another element I added to our front landscape is slated for removal:  the small brush pile under the big laurel oak - at the base of its trunk in the photo below. 

Living in such a high humidity environment, many woody branches are covered with fascinating, feathery mini-gardens of lichen.  When several small branches ornamented in lichen "lace" fell in the front yard, I couldn't bear to put them out for the city to pick up.  Instead I used them to construct a small brush pile towards the back of the bed.  Here is a photo of a branch covered in lichen that fell in our yard...

...and here is a closeup of that lichen.

Several people have asked why I'm leaving "that pile" there and I've taken the time to tell them about the benefits of brush piles, but I've decided to move the pile around to the backyard where it's nobody's business but ours.  The pile's been growing a little faster than I was planning, anyway, as more branches have fallen out of the oak.  I still can't bring myself to send those gorgeous lichens off with the city dump trucks!

Despite my occasional misstep, the plants I've put in the front gardens are taking hold and growing well, getting taller and broader, blooming more fully.  I'm far from the world's best landscape or garden designer, so my color and form combinations are rather haphazard, but I get a buzz of pleasure now when I drive up to our house or walk outside.  For example, when I left the house this morning, I noticed a towhee foraging among the skullcaps by the sidewalk, and there are almost always at least a few butterflies, native bees, or honeybees diligently working the flowers.  Little brown skinks commonly rustle through the leaf mulch and green anoles prowl the shrubs and perennials, males puffing out their salmon-colored throats in displays of pride and power during these lengthening spring days.

I hope my human neighbors come to enjoy my wilding landscape.  I love that the wildlife is making itself at home outside my house...and it makes this yard home for me now, too. 

Texture in the Prairie Garden: Ferny

I love ferns.  They delight me deeply.  However, ferns and south central Kansas don't really go together, at least not without a major input of water and/or very, very special and protected conditions.  I'm not willing to provide the first and I don't have the second, but I can still have some ferny components to my gardens by utilizing a few other plants that are hardy (and native) here.

Columbine:

One of my favorite ferny plants is red columbine (Aquilegia canadensis).  To tell the truth, I've never actually heard this species called red columbine, but that's what the USDA site says the official common name is.  I just usually call it native columbine...which, of course, creates problems because there are many other native columbine species out there!  So, I'll see if I can't start getting used to the official common name.

Red columbine is native to the east half of the United States and Canada and it grows well in shade.  It is a short lived perennial, but reseeds pleasantly, so there are usually young plants coming on as the older individuals fade away.   Red columbine is a touch unusual in that it blooms a soft red with yellow highlights at a time of year when it seems like most other flowers are blooming blue and white and pink, but somehow red columbine just seems to work almost anywhere you plant it.

Some years the leaves of columbine sport even lacier patterns after the columbine leaf miners get to work.  Leaf miners are larval insects that grow by eating out the plant cells living between the upper and lower surfaces of leaves.  The leaf surfaces protect the growing larvae, but you can see the pattern of tunnels they form as they grow and eat.  I've always actually rather liked the patterns leaf miners form, but some people get all upset and consider the leaves "disfigured."  I've seen a few remnants of columbine leaf miners on a few leaves over the past 6 years, but there have never been enough for me to consider them a real problem.

I don't have any personal photos of leaf miners on columbine (did I mention that this hasn't really been a problem for me?), but here is a photo of leaf miners on an unknown plant in the draw, several years ago....

If you feel bound and determined to have perfect leaves - or if the population of leaf miners is just too overwhelming - you can always pick off the affected leaves and dispose of them in the trash or burn them.  On the other hand, remember that predator species take some time to catch up with prey species.  Enjoy the lacy patterns of the leaf miners' tunnels and trust that their numbers will come down in a year or two.

Oh, by the way, leaf mining is a characteristic strategy of several different types of generally tiny insects, ranging from wasps to flies to beetles to moths to sawflies.  Columbine leaf miners are tiny flies.  I have no idea what insect was causing the leaf miner tunnels on the leaves in the photo above....

Spanish needles:

This is a recommendation that is not for the faint of heart...or the heat intolerant, probably.  Spanish needles (Bidens bipinnata) is usually considered a weed, and I totally understand why.  It's an annual native plant with absolutely gorgeous young foliage.  It is native across much of the United States.  The flowers are  bright yellow, but insignificant, and they rapidly turn to seeds that are...vicious in their desire to hitch a ride to a new location.

This is one of those plants that turned up on its own in one of my flower beds.  I noticed several small plants growing and let them be, so that I could see what they would turn into.  I loved them!  That is, I loved them until they got to the end of their life cycle and rapidly went from ferny and green and gorgeous...to dried out and airy porcupines that I could swear shoot their quills.  Spanish needles has definitely mastered, "How do I conquer new worlds?"   In fact, it gets an A+ on that test question.

So, why do I recommend Spanish needles?  Because it's so pretty, of course.  BUT, I highly recommend pulling almost all of the plants out the second you see the first little bright yellow flower.  Yes, that little spot of yellow is the fully open, blooming flower.  You'll actually have to keep a rather close eye on the plants to be sure you don't miss them.

The seeds won't be far behind the first flowers, and the ugly phase has absolutely no redeeming value.  Based on my photographs, you will need to plan on pulling Spanish needles out around the end of July, when it is generally quite hot, so be prepared.  On the plus side, they generally pull out quite easily, so it shouldn't take too long.

If you decide that you, too, enjoy these little guys, you'll want to leave a couple in unobtrusive places so they can go ahead and go to seed.  Just don't leave them to go to seed anywhere that you or your dogs walk past, or you'll be picking the seeds out of fur and jeans and socks for several weeks.

Common Yarrow:

There is absolutely nothing common about common yarrow, in my opinion.  The leaves of the basal rosette, which overwinters, are the closest thing to ferns that I have in my yard.  In fact, they almost outfern real ferns.  And they are tough as nails.

Common yarrow (Achillea millefolium) is "...cosmopolitan throughout the Northern Hemisphere", according to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center's Native Plant Database.   They state that the A. millefolium that is considered native in North America is actually "...a complex of both native and introduced plants and their hybrids."

There are cultivars of common yarrow, too.  (In fact, you could consider the "native" species a cultivar, at this point in time.)  Terracotta, to give an example of one of the commercially available cultivars, is extremely attractive, and there are many, many more cultivars in a wide range of colors.  Even knowing about the colorful cultivars, though, I like the regular, common white, which grows wild all around our property.  It combines beautifully with many other flowers in the spring, and its dried seed heads bring a pleasant texture all their own to the summer and winter grasslands.  (The dried seedheads are popular in dried flower arrangements, as well.)

Here is common yarrow intermixed with spiderwort....

Catclaw Sensitive Briar:

As a child, do you remember touching mimosa leaves and watching in amazement as they folded close in response?  I do.  I thought that was just amazing.  Well, we have a prairie mimosa that does the same thing and, to boot, it has the most gorgeous little miniature, bright pink pom-pom flowers that you could ever want.  Catclaw sensitive briar (Mimosa nuttallii, a.k.a. Mimosa quadrivalvis var. nuttallii) is native to the central portion of our country.  It's a vine with small prickles on its stems - hence the name "briar" in the name - that can trail 2-4', but the plants never gets more than about 12" high.

Despite the prickles on the stems, cattle love this plant for its high protein content and they preferentially graze it.  Because of this preference, you are more likely to see catclaw sensitive briar along roadsides than in pastures.

I don't currently have catclaw sensitive briar in my gardens, but I do have a couple plants on the property.  I think it would make an interesting addition to an informal bed as a "stitcher", winding throughout the other plants and providing some unity throughout the bed(s).  If you have grandchildren, now or in your future, I think this is a plant that would really catch their attention, based on my childhood memories.  Has anyone ever used catclaw sensitive briar in their garden?  If so, I'd love to hear how it worked out for you.

For the moment, this wraps up my suggestions for bold, fine, and ferny textures in the prairie garden.  I'm sure that I will find more species to share with you over the years.  Gardening sure keeps us learning and changing, doesn't it?!