Black Locust Savanna at Iron Bridge Prairie

Black Locust savanna

The savannas in the prairie region mainly consist of Bur Oak, Quercus macrocarpa, but here at the Iron Bridge Prairie at Midewin it is a small savanna or rather open woodland of Black Locust, Robinia pseudoacasia.

The Black Locust is a lovely tree with ornamental branches and a open, loose crown with a scanty leafage that allow some light to pass to the ground and permit a rich understory of grasses and forbs.

The Iron Bridge Prairie at Midewin is fairly new. The restoration of the prairie that once existed here began as late as in 2009. This text is partly taken from an information sign at the prairie. Thanks to many years of cultivating rowcrops as corn and soybeans the soil was rather free from weeds.

Two years ago Midewin staff and volunteers spread 1000 pounds of prairie seeds from 98 different species. This was followed by the planting of 5000 prairie plant plugs.

The first plants to flower are the pioneer plants with rapid growth as Yellow Coneflower, Ratibida pinnata and Wild Bergamot, Monarda fistulosa. They benefit from disturbance and have their best development some few years afterwards.

It will take several years for the majority of the prairie plants to establish their root systems and grow in numbers to out-compete invasive, weedy species.

 

Like a yellow lake of Coneflowers

Monarda and Ratibida are pioneer members of the prairie ecosystem 

Monarda fistulosa, Ratibida pinnata and Coreopsis tripterris

The path through the Black Locust Savanna

Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie

The Royal Catchfly, Silene regia

The Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie is a prairie reserve of about 78 km² (19,000 acres) of land. It is located on the site of the former Joliet Army Ammunition Plant near Elwood south of Chicago in Illinois.

At the headquarter along the road the Welcome Center is surrounded by plantings of different prairie plants you will be able to find at a tallgrass prairie. Inside the building you can get information about suitable walking trails, buy books and learn about the prairie ecosystem from informative posters.

I decided to take the Grass Frog Temporary Trail and indeed I met a lot of frogs along the path. But fist I visited the seed production fields close to the parking area. There I directly already from long distance discovered the bright red Royal Catchfly, Silene regia. It is a very showy slender, upright plant with unbranched stems and glowing red flowers. The Royal Catchfly is rare in nature, but here i captured it growing at the seed beds.

Other plants cultivated for seed production at Midewin were among others Pale Indian Plantain, Arnoglossum atriplicifolium, Rattlesnake Master, Eryngium yuccifolium, Compass Plant, Silphium laciniatum and Prairie Dropseed, Sporobulus heterolepis.

The Welcome Center with prairie plantings

Inside the Welcome Center

If you look closer to the sign above you'll see the yellow area at the small map in the center. Yellow here indicates the pre-settlement extent of prairie habitat around the year 1920. Today most of this land is converted into corn fields or human infrastructur. 

Pale Indian Plantain, Arnoglossum atriplicifolia

Eryngium yuccifolium and Liatris pycnostachya

Seed production of Royal Catchfly, Silene regia

Yellow Coneflower, Ratibida pinnata, at the Grass Frog Temporary Trail

Rudbeckia subtomentosa and Eryngium yuccifolium along the trail

Rudbeckia subtomentosa

Sunflowers

On the way to the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in the end of July earlier this year I passed this field of Sunflowers. Although common sunflower, Helianthus annuus, is a native species of North America and found in nearly every state, the cultivated crop looks quite different from the original wild plants. 

However the field with glowing sunflowers reminds us again of the importance of mass planting in garden design. It gives always a really stunning effect with many individuals planted together in big groups and if you use more species in a composition remember to let one of them dominate to receive the best result.



Bulbs and tubers at Peter Korn's Garden

Peter is showing his botanic garden

Every year Peter Korn arrange a "Bulb Saturday" in his garden south of Gothenburg in Sweden. This year, Saturday 24th of September, he as usual started with a tour in his private botanic garden and there he showed the interested audience his vast collection of rare plants from all over the world, nearly. Peter grows most of the plants in pure sand and gravel and he is very successful in keeping even plants you don't expect would survive on this latitude in the healthiest shape and vigour.

In the rock garden plants from Asia, Europe and North America thrives together

The participants are listening to Peter's experience

Epiolobium fleischeri in the rock garden

One of many Gentiana sinoornata-cultivars in Peter's Korns Garden

Peter Korn in his garden

After the garden tour we all went inside to the Eskilsbygården some few miles away for the afternoon lectures. First Pascal Bruggeman from the Netherlands gave us an interesting slide show about the genus Arisaema, then I delivered a talk about and showed pictures from the tallgrass prairies in North America.

Henrik Zetterlund delivered a speech about bulb meadows and the bulb planting at the botanic garden in Gothenburg there he works and eventually Pascal Bruggeman made a nice finish of the lectures with his talk about Arisaema in the wild.

After the lectures the bulb sale began

Lurie Garden in Millennium Park

The Millennium Park in Chicago is a part of the extensive Grants Park situated between Lake Michigan and South Michigan Avenue. In Grants Park you will among other attractions find the Art Museum, the spectacular and famous Buckingham Fountain and in the very south of the park the Shedd Aquarium with a very wide range of aquatic animals including sharks, turtles and jellyfishes.

On my daughter’s birthday, July 16th 2004, the Millennium Park in the Northern part of Grants Park, was opened to public. Here you can visit the Lurie Garden made by Kathryn Gustafson, Piet Oudolf and Robert Israel.

It is a 20,000 m² (5 acres) big garden divided into two different parts, the light plate and the dark plate, divided by a formal water channel and a broader pathway. Both sides are planted with perennials and are traversed by several walking paths. The perennial planting design is made by Piet Oudolf from the Netherlands. It is a kind of naturalistic planting although the plants are arranged in distinct blocks rather then spread naturally in a meadow like pattern.

Piet has used a mixture of plants from North America, Europe and Asia. The Salvia River known from Drömparken in Enköping in Sweden is here used in a bigger scale and its movement through the planting breaks the static planting blocks a bit in a very beneficial way.

When we visited the park in the end of July the Echinacea purpurea was blooming as best together with especially Hemerocallis and Allium senescens.

Indian Boundary Prairies

Stuart Goldman, Prairie Restoration Specialist

Indian Boundary Prairies consist of four high-quality restored prairie remnants in Markham south of Chicago. Although the four prairies are situated close to each other they all look very different and also inhabit various plants and animals.

The Dropseed Prairie is the smallest, the Sundrop Prairie looks most remote and wild, the Painthbrush Prairie needs more restoration and the Gensburg-Markham Prairie has perhaps the most flagrant flower displays of them all. But they are all four worth the visit and they have all a lot of interesting prairie plants to discover.

At the Gensburg-Markham Prairie I met Mr. Stuart Goldman, restoration specialist and responsible for the maintenance of the prairies in Markham. He told me that when his boss started the renovation of the Gensburg-Markham Prairie it was just a waste land with trees and shrubs and not much left of the former prairie biotope.

Today they have converted the land back to a high-quality prairie with a diverse flora. The soil here is a mixture of black soil and sand and the conditions are more or less mesic, but with both dry and moist sections. One third of the prairie is burned every third year, normally during spring.

Among plants I found in bloom at the prairies in Markham I can mention Allium cernuum, Asclepias syriaca, Asclepias verticillata, Dalea candida, Dalea purpurea, Eryngium yuccifolium, Euphorbia corollata, Liatris spicata, Monarda fistulosa, Parthenium integrifolium, Phlox glaberrima, Pycnathemum virginianum, Ratibida pinnata, Rudbeckia hirta, Silphium integrifolium, Silphium laciniatum, Solidago juncea, Verbena hastata and Vernonia fasciculata.

Liatris spicata and Solidago juncea at the Gensburg-Markham Paririe

Stuart in action with instant weeding of invasive unwanted plants

Liatris spicata and Parthenium integrifolium at the Gensburg-Markham Prairie

Vernonia at the Sundrop Prairie

Smooth Ironweed, Vernonia fasciculata

Yellow Coneflower, Ratibida pinnata

Smooth Phlox, Phlox glaberrima

Worled Milkweed, Asclepias verticillata

White Prairie Clover, Dalea candida and Nodding Onion, Allium cernuum

Wild Bergamot, Monarda fistulosa at the Sundrop Prairie