Art Design 4 Garden

In spite of the dry weather this year (the State drought monitoring committee has just declared five Upstate SC counties to be in extreme drought -- the worst category), there are still tough flowers in the garden.

Once established, blazing stars (Liatris species) are remarkably adapted to drought and clay soil. We have a number of native species here, but the most widely grown (by me, too) is a prairie species, Liatris spicata. Ive had good luck with seemingly desiccated corms from big box stores and a local grocery store, first grown in pots, and then transplanted to the garden.

By the time they have several stems, they also have deep roots, allowing them to weather long dry spells with a minimum of fuss. With a bit of morning or afternoon shade, they do particularly well in dry weather; in decent rainy times, they can become huge.

This New England Aster (Purple Dome) is flowering now in a container, a couple of months ahead of its normal flowering time.

Perhaps the dry soil and heat has triggered early flowering, but its lovely, regardless.

And a tough, hairy-stemmed sunflower, Helianthus hirsutus, is just beginning to flower in the front meadow.

Gardening Gone Wild has a photo contest- a picture of a native plant in a garden setting. The prize- eight agastaches from High Country Gardens! This contest gave me the opportunity to look at a bunch of pictures and think about a lot of plants in a different way.

I fanally settled on this picture of a false dandelion (Agoseris glauca). It is one of my favorite wildflowers, and one of my favorite native plants for the garden. It is very drought tolerant- it grows on the west and south face of Missoulas Mount Sentinel, which gets hotter than the sun in summer, and it is easy to grow. It produces a showy large flower on top of a 2 tall stalk and it blooms continually from late May through July (and even beyond if you were to give it additional water). It is a prolific seeder, and readily volunteers, but since this is one of my favorties, I dont think of this as a bad thing.

In the picture above it is shown growing with (and towering above) an understory of prairie arnica (the darker yellow flowers; Arnica sororia), nodding onion (the little purple flowers; Allium ceruum), and a ground cover of hairy golden aster (Chrysopsis villosa).