Art Design 4 Garden

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).