Bush Cicada: A 2+" Sign That I'm On the Right Track

According to the reading I've done, restoring prairie is very much an art.  In fact, it's as much or more of an art than it is a science.  For example, the steps you should take depend, first of all, on whether you are starting with a plowed field or an overgrazed pasture.  Even with that determined, the process is highly experimental.  After all, for over a century we've been far more concerned with breaking up prairie lands, to plant crops, than we've been concerned with restoring agricultural lands to prairie.

It's almost always easier to destroy something than it is to create it...or to re-create it.

Therefore, even the very first step of restoration was in doubt when I decided I wanted to try to return tallgrass prairie to our 10 acre "homestead", with its 5 acres of overgrazed pasture.  Should I plow up the existing vegetation and/or use Roundup to kill it all off before planting prairie seeds?  The seed I used would supposedly establish more readily that way.  Or should I try to overseed into the existing vegetation? 

I didn't see a lot of vegetation that was worth saving during that first summer we lived here.  The Back Five was filled with redcedars, western ragweed, Baldwin's ironweed, poverty grass, brome, green antelopehorn, and a little bit of yarrow - hardly an inspiring mix.  My instincts, however, told me that plowing it all up or applying Roundup would set the return of the prairie back a lot.

"Following my gut" (to quote Gibbs on NCIS), I started the next year with a spring burn.  I reasoned that it wouldn't hurt and it might help me see if there were other, more desirable, plants being hidden by their assertive neighbors.  It took us two tries, but we did get the Back Five burned that second spring.  Over the summer I watched it carefully to see what showed up.  Fresh growth took several weeks to begin emerging, as that spring turned out to be cold and dry, but eventually the temperatures started to rise and the rains to fall.

What a difference a burn makes!  Oh, there was still a lot of "garbage" vegetation, but I also found white prairie clover, a couple lead plants, wild alfalfa, dotted gayfeather, and (best of all) FIVE spring ladies' tresses.  There was no way that I was going to plow up or Roundup that 5 acres!

So I decided to overseed.  Over the last 5 years, I've scattered seed, usually in the mowed trails, and I've watched for more hidden gems to emerge from the seed bank in the soil.  As with most natural systems, progress has seemed slow.  Prairie plants put down roots first, significant leaves next, and flowers - the most visible sign that a plant has established - last of all.  It can takes years before a newly establishing perennial or grass plant blooms, which means that it can take years before you know that your seeding has been successful.  Overseeding is especially slow, since far fewer of the seeds will be able to outcompete the already established plants on the site.  Severe heat and drought over the last several years have further impeded any progress.  Finally, though, I feel like the prairie is beginning to peek out through the overgrazed pasture it's been hiding under....

The poverty grass has become a much smaller component of the flora in the last 7 years.  Whereas it used to be impossible to walk through the Back Five without getting many of its painful seeds in my socks, these days I have to search the area for a while to find any obvious stands of it.

There are swaths of tall dropseed now and well established patches of side-oats grama.   The dotted gayfeather has spread from a scant dozen plants in one, well confined area to dozens of plants, scattered in several large, beautiful patches throughout the Back Five.  Whorled milkweed has started to form graceful colonies from single plants that were easy to overlook at first.

Meadowlarks nest each summer.  I've seen a jackrabbit several times, and coyotes regularly leave signs that they, too, are enjoying the area.

Compass plants have shown up, as well.  While I scattered some seed four or five years ago, several of the first plants that I noticed, a year or two later, were already large enough that I suspect they were actually holdovers which had survived the many years of pasturage.   Now there are a couple dozen compass plants;  6 of them put up flower spikes this year.

Which leads me to my latest promising sign of the return of the tallgrass prairie.  Last Thursday, on my latest walkabout, I photographed, among many other plants and animals, a large cicada making itself at home on the compass plant flower stalk above.  Large cicadas aren't unusual around here, so I almost didn't take this individual's photo, but having one so nicely posed on the compass plant stalk was a little different, so I spent the few extra electrons and minutes to record the image.

Over the weekend, I edited my photos and decided, somewhat on a whim, to send this image in to Bug Guide to see which cicada species this individual actually represented.  Some insects I seem to be able to identify without too much trouble.  Others, like cicadas, I have yet to learn enough about to reliably name.  Every other large cicada image I've sent in to Bug Guide has turned out to be Tibicen auriferus, the Plains Dog-Day Cicada, in one color variant or another.  This one didn't look like that, but I'd been fooled before.

This morning I received my answer from the Entomology Gods:  my large cicada is a Bush Cicada, Tibicen dorsatus. 

Why am I doing a happy dance?  Why does it matter to me which species of cicada this is?

Well, I'm probably over-reacting here, but on the Bug Guide information page about the Bush Cicada, it states, "A beautiful species that now exists in scattered isolates across much of its former range. Although listed as "secure" (i.e. "not threatened/endangered"), many populations, particularly those isolated in more developed areas, should be monitored and conserved."  I take that to mean that the species is on the decline, overall, and my little 5 acres of restoring prairie may be helping it to maintain a slightly healthier population.

Helping a potentially declining species to retain a healthier population is one of the big reasons why I garden, and definitely why I garden the way I do.   In a nutshell.  Or in a cicada cast, as the case may be.

Oh, my Bush Cicada?  Another common name for it is Splendid Prairie Cicada...and I think that's a perfectly splendid name.

Texture in the Prairie Garden: Bold

I gave a talk yesterday at the Spring Gardening Workshop here in Sedgwick County.  As always, I'm afraid, I had more that I wanted to share than I had time to talk in. (My Uncle Ed used to call me Windy Cindy when I was a child...probably with very good reason!)  I thought it might work well to share some of the ideas and suggestions I had for "(Re)Creating Naturally Functional Landscapes in our Yards and Gardens" on my blog. 

So let me start with one of the biggest problems I've run into as I continue to develop my own prairie gardens:  texture.   Many, if not most, of the prairie plants are medium in texture.  The leaves are medium in shade of green and medium in size.  The flowers are medium in size.  The plants tend to be 3-4 feet tall and about as wide.  It's very easy to get an overwhelming mass effect, but much harder to have a variety of different textures that create interest based on contrasting sizes, shapes, and forms.

First though, before I share some of my "secrets," I'd like to point out that the triumph of the "medium" in the prairie is, in great part, due to natural constraints.  Large leaves have large surfaces that tend to lose lots of water, which isn't good for plants growing in an environment famous for extended droughts and unceasing winds.  Speaking of those winds, they have a major tendency to rip large leaves and flowers to shreds which, ironically, leaves you with medium-textured pieces hanging on.

Color is another drought issue.  Generally, the wetter the climate, the deeper the green of the plants that grow there.  Hot, dry climates favor gray-greens.  The prairie, being half way in between those two extremes (and enjoying wild vacillations between the two), tends to stick in the middle with medium green shades.  In short, "medium" is so abundant in the prairie because it works very well there.

Medium, however, presents us with a problem of "too much of a good thing" when designing interesting gardens.  So here are some suggestions for prairie plants that break out of the "medium" mold, starting BOLDLY with plants that bravely present big leaves to the prairie winds.

Giant Coneflower:

Used increasingly in professionally designed landscapes, giant coneflower (Rudbeckia maxima) steers clear of medium in almost all aspects.  In the photo below, the giant coneflower is in the bottom lefthand corner, at the front of the flower bed....

Native to the southern Great Plains, it boasts large, gray-green leaves with a soft, waxy look that stay in a beautiful low rosette for much of the year.  During early-mid summer, giant coneflower sends up 4' tall spikes crowned with a single, large "boned" bloom:  a tall central cone, surrounded by drooping yellow petals.

If you can refrain from cutting off the finished blossoms to tidy up the garden, they provide a good seed source for winter birds while giving vertical accents to the winter landscape.  The hollow, dried stems are also great habitat for solitary bees, those native masters of efficient pollination.

Compass Plant:

A classic prairie plant and widely distributed throughout the center of the country, compass plant (Silphium laciniatum) is said to have helped pioneers navigate because its large, deeply lobed leaves tend to line up in a north-south orientation in order to capture the strongest rays of the sun.

When you touch the leaves of the compass plant, you understand how it compensates for the large leaf surface that it exposes to the prairie winds:  the leaves are very rough, thick and coarse to the touch, almost like a form of sandpaper.  Despite that unappealing feel, apparently cattle graze the leaves with great relish, so compass plant doesn't last long in pastures.

Although the leaves provide a basal rosette that is only 18"-24" tall, like the giant coneflower, the bloom spike pushes up 4-5' into the air.  Unlike the giant coneflower,  though, this spike is ornamented with 3" wide sunflower-like blooms along its entire length.  Compass plant blossoms start opening at the top of the spike and slowly work their way down the length of the stem over a period of several weeks.

Again, if you leave the spike intact when the blooming is complete, it provides visual interest as well as bird food and insect shelter throughout the winter.

Milkweed:

There are several beautiful milkweeds that provide thick, large leaves and big balls of fragrant pink blossoms for bold texture in the garden.  The three that I'm most familiar with, and that occur naturally on our property, are somewhat hard for me to tell apart, but all three are very appealing plants.  All, too, are monarch larval plants and thus VERY important to plant for trying to save one of our favorite native butterflies.

Common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) is probably the most well known of these three.  Its native distribution covers the central and eastern portions of North America.  Because of its tendency to spread by its roots, it has earned the reputation of a weed in cultivated fields and it probably wouldn't work in a formal garden, but it would be a great addition to an informal, cottage style border.

Here is a closeup of common milkweed's blooms, complete with monarch, for comparison with the next two plants.

The second milkweed, smooth milkweed (Asclepias sullivantii), is also known as prairie milkweed.  It is very similar to common milkweed, but its native distribution is much more restricted to the central prairies.  This is the one of these three "pink pomander" milkweeds that grows best for me, and it is the one that I have seen the most monarch caterpillars on.

Based on its native distribution, the third of these 3 pink milkweeds, showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa), is almost a western version of common milkweed. 

Again, here is a closer look at the bloom.  Showy milkweed's blossoms have lo-o-ong, upright "petals", giving the bloom an almost spiky appearance.  They ARE certainly showy, though, which makes them the easiest of the 3 for me to identify!

All three of these pink milkweed species grow about 30"-36" tall.  I do not know how assertively either smooth or showy milkweed spread, compared to common milkweed.  None of the three form exclusive patches, however, in any situation where I have seen them growing; thus all three should be fine in an informal garden setting.

Before I leave milkweeds, let me briefly mention a common species that is perhaps worthy of consideration for incorporation into some garden beds:  green antelopehorn (Asclepias viridis).  Frequently seen in pastures during the spring, green antelopehorn blooms very early in the season and stays quite low, topping out at 18" but more commonly about 12" tall.  While the leaves of this milkweed aren't as big as those of common, showy or smooth milkweed, they are larger than almost any other plant growing at this time of year and thus they provide a bolder texture in the landscape, too.

Found primarily in the center of the country, this plant's creamy white flowers with eye-catching, inner purplish "clubs" are an intriguing contrast to more traditionally constructed blooms.

Oakleaf Hydrangea:

Although native just to the southeast of the U.S., I have seen oakleaf hydrangea (Hydrangea quercifolia) growing as far north as Ontario.  It grows well here, too, with a bit of protection from strong summer winds and from too much summer afternoon sun.

Oakleaf hydrangea is one of my favorite shrubs.  Its large, lobed leaves are attractive throughout the growing season, but they are especially vivid and eye-catching during the fall, when they turn a gorgeous burgundy, sometimes tinged with orange.  The bark is rather cinnamon colored and exfoliates as the shrub gets larger, while the dried flower heads remain throughout the winter, giving nice winter interest in the garden. 

Oakleaf hydrangea flowers, by the way, start out a beautiful, pale lime green, mature to white, get pinkish as they age, and end up a soft gray-brown, staying attached to the plant until the newly developing leaves and flowers push them off the following spring.  This is truly a 4 season plant!

Catalpa:

If, from a distance, you see a tree whose large, light, bright green, heart-shaped leaves make it stand out from other trees, chances are you are looking at a catalpa.  In the picture below, the catalpa is the tree in the middle.  To its left is a bur oak, to its right is an osage orange.  The bur oak and the catalpa were planted about 20 years ago, I believe, but I don't know how old the osage orange is. 

Note how much more upright the catalpa grows, and how much lighter a green its leaves are.  One of the latest blooming trees, catalpa blooms in June, after its leaves are fully emerged.  The white blossoms are wonderfully fragrant and occur in big, showy clusters above the leaves.  If we move in closer here, we can see (and smell) the sweet flowers.

Somewhat oddly, those big showy clusters of flowers develop into long, thin pods that remain on the tree throughout the winter.  I find the tree with its winter dress of dangling, long pods to be quite attractive, but I'll warn you that many people find the pods to be a nuisance, creating more of a cleanup chore than they desire.


There are actually 2 species, southern catalpa (Catalpa bignonioides) and northern catalpa (Catalpa speciosa) whose ranges overlap throughout much of the country.  The difference between the two species is very slight and, for all practical purposes, they function the same way in the landscape, so I will just talk about them as one species, "catalpa".


Both of these species originally had a very small native range in the southeast U.S., which you can see in the Wikipedia links above, but both were widely planted as settlers homesteaded around the country.  I have been told that catalpa was one of the primary species used to "claim" a homestead and that it was widely used for fenceposts until osage orange (a.k.a. hedge apple) was discovered to be even longer lasting in that capacity.  The wood, although very light, does not rot rapidly when in contact with the soil.

Catalpa is also known as the "fishing worm" tree.  Apparently the caterpillars of the catalpa sphinx moth were commonly used as fishing bait in days gone by.  Supposedly these hornworm caterpillars can get numerous enough to defoliate the tree...but I have never observed a single catalpa "worm", so it's not something that worries me overly much about using the tree in the landscape.

Well, such as they are, those are my suggestions for bold texture in the prairie plant palette.  Next on the list will be fine and ferny textured plants...but I'll leave those for another post.

If you've got any other boldly textured prairie plants that you think would be good in a garden, I'd love to learn about them!

Patchwork Prairie

Several years ago now, I asked for suggestions on what to name our little piece of property.  I got a few suggestions, but none of them seemed right.  The ideas I was coming up with didn't fit either.  So I let the concept brew for a while longer and eventually a name suggested itself.

Patchwork Prairie.

It's not a fancy name...but, then, this isn't a fancy piece of property.  The name fits on many levels and, most importantly, it comes naturally as I think about our land.  So Patchwork Prairie it is.

So what do I think about our property?  Why does the concept of "patchwork" seems to fit so perfectly?

First of all, prairies themselves are patchworks of many plants:  a clump of this, a spread of that, a few individuals stitching things together throughout, another large swath of something else over here.   Different patches appear during different seasons.  It's a crazy quilt design where some pieces intermingle with others and it all changes from year to year.  To give you examples, right now, on the back 5 acres (Back Five) that we are working to restore from highly overgrazed pasture to reasonable prairie, I have large swaths of tall dropseed (Sporobolus compositus) developing.  I didn't notice any tall dropseed at all in our Back Five until the second year we were here; now it's a major component of our grassland.  In the photo below, the tall dropseed is occurring in the two lighter gold sweeps that run from one side of this photo to the other.

There are almost a dozen patches, ranging from large to small, of dotted gayfeather (Liatris punctata).  The first summer, I noticed fewer than a dozen gayfeathers in one single, small area.  Presumably, all of the current patches have either spread from those original plants or the plants in each of them were simply too stunted to bloom for the first several years.

Heath aster (Symphyotrichum ericoides), the small, white flowers in the photo below, and silver bluestem (Bothriochloa laguroides subsp. torreyana), the grasses with the soft, fluffy seedheads in the same photo, are found throughout the Back Five, stitching all of the recovering prairie together.

An increasing number of compass plants (Silphium laciniatum) are beginning to appear scattered throughout the Back Five, acting as another "stitcher."  I found my first ones about 3 years ago, and have now counted over 2 dozen individuals.  The photo to the left shows one of only 3 compass plants that were mature enough to bloom this year.


Another stitcher, this time one that's declining as the grassland recovers, is the annual threeawn grass (Aristida sp.) that was so prevalent 6 years ago - I can walk the paths and not get a single awn in my socks these days, which is a major change from when we started.  The whitish grass, leaning over the mowed path, is a threeawn plant that I found this morning.

There are large, diffuse patches of white prairieclover (Dalea candida) in the spring

and I've even noticed a few small patches of whorled milkweed (Asclepias verticillata) developing.

On the other hand, another milkweed known as green antelopehorn (Aslcepias viridis) is dispersed everywhere during the spring, but is nowhere to be seen at this time of year.

It's not just the recovering prairie that's a patchwork on our 10 acres.  The entire property is, itself, a patchwork quilt:  the house and lawn (moving towards buffalo grass, Buchloe dactyloides) with flower beds form one major patch with smaller areas forming patterns within it.  Other patches include the courtyard; the vegetable garden; the lagoon area; the Draw; the Cedar Grove; the front tallgrass areas; and the Back Five, the recovering pasture/prairie. Within each of these patches are smaller patterns:  aromatic aster (Symphyotrichum oblongifolium) in the flower beds, rows of eastern redcedars (Juniperus virginiana) forming hedges at the edges, different vegetables in each of the raised vegetable garden beds, a large area of prairie wild rose (Rosa arkansana) in the Cedar Grove, panicled aster (Symphyotrichum lanceolatum) in the draw, pokeberry (Phytolacca americana) along the edges of the draw and up near the house.  Paths stitch the patchwork areas together.


Finally, patchwork is a perfect historical term for modern human life on the prairies too.  European and other settlers had a tradition of using even small scraps of cloth from wornout clothing or from other leftover material.  The women would gather these scraps and sew them together to make warm, artistically beautiful and intricate quilts:  patchwork quilts.  The settlements themselves formed a patchwork on the prairie of different cultures from around the world.  And, of course, the farms soon created patches in the landscape - eventually forming a quilt that almost completely replaced the original prairie with agricultural fields.

Patchwork Prairie.  It's the right name for now, and we'll be working to increase the richness of our crazy quilt of a property for as long as we are its stewards.  The pattern is set.  Our success will be measured in the future.

My First Blooming Compass Plant!

I think it was two years ago now that I first noticed a compass plant or two or twenty in the Back Five.  Their leaves are so distinctive that it's one of the few native perennials that's easy to identify, even without seeing it bloom.

About 18 months after we moved in, I attended a Lunchtime Lecture at Botanica where Brad Guhr of Dyck Arboretum was speaking.  He had brought along several compass plant bloom spikes, with some open blooms, spent blooms and young seed on them.  After the talk, he offered the bloom spikes to anyone who wanted them - I grabbed one? two? ten? (I can't remember now) and brought them home, scattering the seed in the Back Five.  The young seed wasn't fully mature yet, so I wasn't sure if there was even a chance that any compass plants could establish.

But they have!  The photo to the right is the first bloom spike for a compass plant that I have seen on our property!  I took this shot on the 4th of July - a great American find on a great American holiday.  I am 5'6" tall;  this flower spike is my height or a little taller, just to give you a little sense of scale. 

My seed-scattering history aside, I think this particular plant - and maybe one other one - may actually have predated my restoration efforts;  these two plants are so large that they may be remnants from the original prairie here.  On the other hand, most of the compass plants that I see now throughout my little acreage have two or three leaves this year and are far from blooming.  Since compass plants are supposedly like trees, with a leaf for every year of life, at least when they are young, this plant would appear to be much older than our measly 5+ years of "occupation," while the littler ones would seem appropriate for seedlings from the seed Brad so generously shared.

The scientific name of compass plant is Silphium laciniatum, and this tallgrass prairie native is found throughout much of the middle of the country.  Its common name is derived from its foliage:  the large, thick, sandpaper-textured leaves with their deep lobes tend to align pointing north to south, minimizing the exposure of the leaves' sufaces to the hot, noonday sun, but capturing plenty of light throughout the mornings and afternoons.  Pioneers apparently used this plant to help themselves navigate.

Although the basal leaves grow up to about 2' in width, the real size of the compass plant comes from its flower stalk, which can tower up to 12 feet above the prairie soil.  The flowers look very similar to sunflowers, but if you look closely there is a major difference:  unlike sunflowers, only the ray (or petal) flowers are fertile in these blossoms.  Therefore seeds are only produced around the rim of the dried flower head.

Typical of a prairie native, the roots of compass plant grow very deep - up to 16' - helping it to survive dry times with panache.  There would probably be more compass plants around except that cattle find it very tasty and will eat it to the ground so frequently that the plants soon lose all their energy stores and die.  In the last few years, though, I've been seeing a fair number of compass plants along the roadsides in certain areas - on the turnpike south of Topeka, for example, and in Butler County along some of the country roads - where the main grazers are grasshoppers and bush hogs.

If you choose to plant compass plants in your garden, be careful about siting them correctly from the very beginning, as their deep tap roots make them hard to transplant once established.  Know that they will grow quite tall and be sure to plan accordingly.  For prairie gardens, they can be a particularly nice addition since their large leaves add a unique texture with a coarse feel, a rather unusual combination in the normally "medium" textured prairie palette.

Birds relish compass plant seeds and many use the dried stalks to perch on while they're overlooking the grasslands.  There are even 2 species of insects, the silphium beetle and the prairie cicada, that are specialist feeders on compass plants and others in their genus.  I have never seen either of these insect species, so I can't show you photos, but one of these days I hope to remedy that lack.

Compass plants flower from the top of the flower stalk down.  Almost 3 weeks after I saw the original blooms, the flower spike looked like this on Monday.  Busily munching away were these beasties....

...known as two-striped grasshoppers (Melanoplus bivittatus).   Two-striped grasshoppers are common creatures of town and country.  They can become quite destructive, eating a wide variety of plant material, including some crops such as alfalfa.  Here they are performing their more classic function, acting as the primary herbivore (grazer) on the prairie - in this case, eating the flowers of the compass plants.

This morning I couldn't resist taking another photo of the compass plant.  The drought and heat is even taking its toll on this stalwart prairie plant, but it's gamely continuing to bloom, even as some of its basal leaves turn brown and die.   You can see that its bloom period is probably not quite half over, since the open bloom is about 1/3 of the way down the bloom stalk. 

We have a 30% chance of rain tonight and tomorrow - the best chance we've had in weeks.  We're all keeping our fingers crossed and doing literal and figurative rain dances.  Wish us well!