Northwind Perennial Farm

Roy Diblik at the entrance to the show gardens

On the way to Madison we visited Northwind Perennial Farm near Lake Geneva in Wisconsin and Roy Diblik showed us around in the show gardens and the garden shop. Roy Diblik is a devoted perennial grower with a big range of native prairie plants in his assortment.

He is also creating natural plantings and in Millennium Park I adored his yellow tallgrass prairie near the Art Institute of Chicago. I like that Roy is using a method of planting similar to my way of doing it. He makes informal groups or natural mixtures of plants far from the old fashioned block system still used by most garden designers.

The garden shop managed by Colleen Carrigan is also something extra. Despite that we all know that the best way of selling plants is to show the customers how to use them, most plant shops, at least in Europe, still arrange their perennials in long rows and in the most extreme case even according to their Latin names.

Here instead the plants are standing in front of a poster showing a delicate planting. So you get inspired by the picture and will directly find the plants used in the planting on close picking distance. Look at the photos further down and judge yourself. Could it be better?

In the show gardens native plants are mixed with exotics

This is how plants should be arranged in a plant shop

Get inspired, read, pick, buy and plant at home!

The barn behind the the perennials is filled up with old, beautiful stuff 

Have a look inside the barn...

Closed due to storm damage

Creeping Juniper, Juniperus horizontails growing on the sand dunes

The south unit of the Illinois Beach State Park was and is still closed to the public, so unfortunately I couldn't walk around as I expected when we came to this dune biotope the last day of July this summer.

During a short walk close to the resort I at least met the creeping juniper, Juniperus horizontalis, at the sand dunes together with Flowering Spruge, Euphorbia corollata, Purple Prairie Clover, Dalea purpurea, and Cylindrical Blazingstar, Liatris cylindracea. 

As I was not allowed to walk in the area I instead drove some few miles north to the Chiwaukee Prairie in Kenosha in Wisconsin. But that's another story.

The shore of Lake Michigan at Illinois Beach in Zion

Flowering Spruge, Euphorbia corollata

Trees and branches are fallen and the area is closed for visitors

The result of the summer storm

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.