A good year for arrowleaf balsamroot in our yard: thoughts on plant slection for your prairie

It is a good year for arrowleaf balsamroot (Balsamorhiza sagittata) in our little front yard prairie. This year four of our plants are flowering- the most ever, and the ones that are flowering have many blooms. The arrowleaf balsamroot is the staple of spring and early summer on the hills, open Ponderosa pine forests, and prairies of Montana. This is such a common, large, long- lived and showy flower, that you would think it would be common in home gardens, but it is not for a couple of good reasons.

The arrowleaf balsamroot, is long-lived and has a huge taproot. The tap root may get to 4" in diameter and over eight feet deep! This taproot allows it to tolerate severe drought, harsh winters, fire and grazing (by cattle and game animals).

However, because of this taproot it is very difficult to transplant- not impossible, but it is really not worth trying (especially from plants in the wild). The good news, sort of (keep reading), is that it can be grown pretty well from seed, but you need patience if you want to see the big showy flowers. Typically around here it takes about 7 years for a seedling to flower. I have read that in some conditions it might be as few as 5, though.

This spring I was delighted to see that we have about a dozen or so volunteers (see picture below), so in about 2015, look for our yard to be awash in balsamroot.

Lupine species (including Lupinus argenteus, and L. sericeus ) share many of the same traits as balsamroot: long-lived, beautiful, common, showy, and nearly impossible to transplant. Again, they are very easy to grow from seed, but it, too, does not flower for 4 or 5 years. Also, our experience is that even though getting seeds started is easy, survivorship until flowering is low.

Lupines and balsamroot require your patience and planning. Both are great for your garden, but they might not be the best choice when starting your native plant garden (certainly don't try to transplant ones from the wild). On the other hand, maybe you should get started on these first. If you are even remotely thinking about a native prairie, go out and plant a balsamroot seed today. But make sure it is in the perfect spot, because you can't move it!

Greenhouse Construction Update No. 3

Here are a couple of pictures of the greenhouse (the picture above is the south side and the picture below is the north side). I finished the framing today, and I went to Home Resource and got some plywood sheathing and 15lb roofing felt. It is amazing the stuff you will find there. The nice thing is the plywood is reused and I only had to buy 25' of the roofing paper (as opposed to buying an entire 144' roll). So, in a few minites I'll sheath the north side of the roof and cover it with paper. Then I guess I can start putting in some windows- at least the ones on the south side of the roof. I have been really looking forward to installing the windows, and you can see one at the bottom left (north west corner), where I set one sash in place.

Garden design and wildlife gardening books

I taught a workshop yesterday at the Montana Natural History Center on Native Plant Landscaping, Wildlife Gardening and Garden Design. Preparing for this class got me to re read many books and articles I have had on the shelf and have been thinking about since writing this last post about planning.

Below are some of my favorite books on garden design and wildlife gardening. Interestingly, my favorite books on garden design are actually about interior design and architecture.

If you were in the class today- these the the references from my last slide:

Bringing Nature Home- Douglas Tallamy

The Not So Big House series- Sarah Susankah
- Examples Creating the Not So Big House, Inside the Not So Big House, and all the others

Fine Gardening Design Guides
–Example Gardening in Small Spaces

Best of Fine Gardening Series
–Example Garden Rooms

Shrink Your Lawn- Evelyn Hadden

Noah's Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards- Sara Stein

Paradise by Design, Native Plants and the New American Landscape- Kathryn Phillips

The Forgotten Pollinators- Buchmann, Nabhan, and Mirocha

Landscaping Ideas of Jays- Judith Larner Lowry

Gardening with a Wild Heart -Judith Larner Lowry

Plant a standing snag for wildlife

Standing snags (dead trees) are a common structural component in forests and riparian areas. Their importance in the wild is well known, studied and understood. But they can have the same beneficial role in your garden as well. A standing snag may be one of the best features to attract a variety of wildlife species to your yard. Although birds are just one of the many animals that will benefit from a snag, to give you an idea of a snag’s importance, up to 45% of bird species in the forests of North America use cavities found in snags.

The rationale behind using nest boxes is that you are providing a replacement for habitat lost from the removal of dead or decadent trees. Dead or dying trees are the first thing to get removed in managed landscapes (whether a backyard or city park), or even preparing up your yard for a wildlife garden. However, by leaving dead trees standing, or even planting a dead tree, you can add habitat, structure and yearlong visual interest to your yard. This is a great gardening project for people concerned about their lack of a green thumb.

What species of tree makes a good snag?

Anything. But in this area cottonwood (Populus trichocarpa), aspen (Populus tremuloides), ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa), Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii ) or lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) will probably be the best- they are the ones birds, insects and other animals are used to. Although cottonwood and aspen make great snags, they will probably be shorter lived than the pines or fir.

Where can you get a snag?

You may have one and you don’t even know it. Sometimes, the best snag is simply a tree in your yard that has gotten too tall, is diseased or is just unwanted. Rather than replacing it, removing it, or healing it, let it die in place. You could prune it back to shape to an aesthetically pleasing standing snag, and kill it in a variety of ways (from girdling, to a herbicide treatment to heavy handed pruning- obviously without cutting it down), and leave it. For example, in our backyard, one of the first trees we planted was a 4’ Ponderosa pine. It has grown a lot faster than I expected, and right now it is a great size, but my long-range goal for this tree is as a snag in the yard (its days are numbered).

You can also find snags that are suitable for firewood cutting (check local laws about cutting or removing standing or fallen trees from forests, and certainly don’t remove any from riparian area or waterways), in slash piles, or even in your neighborhood where trees are being removed. Contact local tree services- they might even deliver one to you.

How big should a snag be?
As big as you can manage. However, check with building codes for height restrictions in your area (probably not a big deal). Also consider the size of your garden, and adjacent buildings. In general, try to get a snag that will have at least 10’ exposed above grade (so a total length of at least 15’). The larger the diameter of the snag the more useful it will be to wildlife. For example, to get nuthatches or flickers to excavate a nest, the diameter needs to be at least 8-12” where the snag is 6-10’ from the ground.

How to plant a standing snag

Typically strive to bury at least 25-30% of the length of the tree in the ground and set it as you would a fence post. Dig the hole at least below the frost line in your area, and as deep as 30% of the snag length, fill the bottom of the hole with about 4” or gravel or cobble for drainage, insert the snag, check for plumb and back fill and compact the soil around the base. Be careful not to plant the snag under overhead wires or power lines (snag humor- they don’t grow).

Integrate the snag into your landscaping

This is important, make it look intentional and have it blend in with your landscape. A standing snag is a strong structural element in your landscape that can dominate, but with some thought and planning it can blend into the landscape. A snag is a great structure that provides gardeners with an opportunity to showcase climbing or vining plants. In western Montana, if your snag is in the shade, orange honeysuckle (Lonicera ciliosa) or blue clematis (Clematis columbiana) are great vines. If it is in a sunny spot, western white clematis (Clematis ligusticifolia) will be a great addition. Also consider the location for the snag, and place it in a natural surrounding, nestled among trees or shrubs (as opposed to out in the middle of a lawn), and often times it is nice to place on near deciduoius trees so when they lose their leaves in the winter, the snag will provide interest and structure.

They don’t last forever

Eventually the base of the snag will rot (how quickly will depend on the soil type, tree species, age of tree, etc...), so plan for this and perhaps plan to incorporate the fallen snag into your landscaping plans. While you are at it, don’t limit yourself to standing snags, fallen snags also provide a lot of habitat for wildlife and add visual interest and character to your garden. They can also make the base for a brush pile.

Construction update: bird nests and greenhouse

Bird nesting updates:

The Black capped chickadees hatched yesterday (May 5), and this puts them just about on schedule for a typical fledging time of around June 3.

The northern flickers are still courting (and stuff I can't mention here), and the male is still doing a little bit of excavating. I think the female may have laid the first egg yesterday (May 5) and is beginning to incubate

Greenhouse construction update:

This weekend, I installed the floor (recycled 100-year old Missoula brick, see below), and framed the four walls. All the framing lumber is from Home Resource in Missoula and most is recycled lumber, the rest is sustainably and locally harvested.

All the framing members that will be exposed- either inside or outside the greenhouse were primed and painted (2 coats), on all 6 sides prior to installation (primer and paint also from Home Resource- $5/ gallon!).

In the photo below you can see the grate over the compost furnace in the floor. This is actually a temporary one, one to use while I finish construction so I don't fall in... again. The grate is slatted to allow warm air and CO2 from the compost to rise into the greenhouse.

To the south (to the right in the picture below) of the brick floor is an open area that will be a raised bed. Hopefully this weekend I will frame the gable ends and even the rafters.

"Pollinator" gardens

So, until a few days ago, I had never heard the term "Pollinator garden". Apparently it’s a popular term among gardeners now. A few days ago a local naturalist contacted me about a pollinator garden she is designing and wanted some tips. She is a fantastic ecologist, and educator, and I was really flattered she contacted me, so I was eager to help. I played it cool like I knew exactly what she was talking about; I did not want to expose my gardening naïveté. After we spoke, however, I went home and did some research on what a "pollinator garden" was. Surprisingly (to me), there was a lot of information out there, and I even found a recent article in the New York Times (here), and commentary on that article by Town Mouse/Country Mouse.

A pollinator garden is one that is designed to provide flowers for pollinators. Right away I felt myself becoming frustrated with the term “pollinator garden” for its focus on (1) flowers and (2) one category of wildlife.

Mind you, there is nothing wrong with a pollinator garden, per say, and there are certainly many benefits. I am really encouraged that native plants are getting recognized for their vital role in supporting pollinators, but I am not sure this is the appropriate context. The term that should be used is “ecosystem”. More on that later.

If “pollinator gardening” as a concept sparks interest in someone to garden, to garden with native plants or garden for the first time, then it is incredibly valuable. Similarly, if a pollinator garden encourages more people to remove parts of their lawn, then again it is fantastic, and very beneficial to wildlife. So there are many positives with the burgeoning pollinator garden popularity. I wonder if the pollinator garden movement can be traced back to a fantastic book called “The Forgotten Pollinators” by Buchmann, Nabhan, and Mirocha. If you haven’t read it, give it a read.

Although pollinator gardeners might provide nectar to pollinators and help attract some insects, the real problem is we have made vast expanses of land unrecognizable to native pollinators (and many other species of wildlife) by converting our native plant communities to ones that resemble plant communities in other parts of the world. But recent evidence suggests that by using native plants in urban, and suburban landscaping, we can reverse the declines of native insects, and ultimately higher trophic organisms. Douglas Tallamy has written books and papers on this subject (click here for more information and downloads).

However, my first reaction is that “pollinator gardens” are another example of a failed attempt at “single species management”. That is agency-speak for when you manage for one species (often the wrong one), with the intention of protecting the ecosystem. When in fact it is often backward. As I have mentioned before, we need to distance ourselves from the idea of planting a single species to attract a single species or life stage of the species, and garden with a broader understanding of biology and ecology.

"Pollinators" as a group are diverse; they range from ants, to birds to bats. If your goal is to provide habitat or food for pollinators, for example, your garden should be equally diverse to be effective. Furthermore when people think of “pollinator gardening,” most people plant flowers that may attract adult bees or butterflies. However what is truly limiting to many pollinators (especially butterflies and moths), are the plants that host their larval stage. The larval stage is so important- but we don’t garden for it explicitly because we don’t witness the larval stage of pollinators very much. I don't see too many people planting expanses of prairie June grass to promote the larval skippers, though that might be the most important plant in a pollinator garden.

So that brings me back to my ongoing philosophy of wildlife gardening with native plants: think broadly, think holistically, and think of diversity- diversity of structure, diversity of species, and diversity of life stages. Ecosystems are complex and it’s not effective to match one species of plant to one species of animal.

In the end, pollinator gardens are not that bad, and probably a very good thing, but it is a shame the idea is so close to articulating the importance of native plant communities and promoting conservation and restoration of ecosystems, if even at the scale of a suburban yard.

Greenhouse construction update

Building this greenhouse was actually the motivation for me to start this blog. Today, I am finally getting around to an update of the progress of its construction- mainly with some pictures.
I have written a few posts about the greenhouse; a general description of the green house is here, plans for the greenhouse can be seen here, and my plan for heating the greenhouse is here.

In general, I am constructing this greenhouse out of recycled materials, and I have designed it to be energy efficient with the site and our latitude in mind. Our plan is to grow hardy vegetables in the greenhouse all year long, and use to it start plants and extend the growing season by a couple of months for warm weather vegetables (read: hot peppers).

It has been a really fun project, learning about greenhouses, designing the greenhouse and accumulating all the pieces. Since it is almost all made from recycled or reused materials, accumulating the parts has taken a while

Site preparation was slow- I had to remove and pot up all the plants that were in the greenhouse footprint, including 50+ bitterroots. This was compounded by my eagerness to begin the project this spring and the reality of having to wait for many species to come up.All these potted plants filled up our nursery and even filled up space in all our raised beds. We will grow these plants for another week, and transplant them to our front yard- where we started a little makeover project- more on this in another post.

Also, we will probably donate some of these plants to the Clark Fork Chapter of the Montana Native Plant Society's annual native plant sale- at the Missoula Farmer's Market on May 16th. Depending on the quantity and diversity of plants he have left over, we might even have a plant sale of our own at the Missoula Farmers Market in late May or early June. Below, all the plants are removed from the greenhouse area.

Initial grading and 8" compacted gravel base, onto which the treated 4x6 foundation was installed, and secured to the ground with lengths of 36" re-bar.

After a lot of deliberation, and a lot of advice, I finally decided to use just a compacted gravel base and pressure treated wood foundation for the greenhouse. I considered almost every iteration of building a foundation. My friend Barry finally convinced to me to build it this way (if it goes wrong, it is his fault). Actually Barry is a fantastic carpenter and builder, so I totally trust him.

Below is the compost furnace before going into the ground. It is a 30" x30" x 36" deep box, insulated from with ground with 2" rigid insulation. I installed it on top of 4" of cobble/ gravel for drainage. You can read about the compost furnace here- if it works it will heat the greenhouse in the winter. If it does not work, we will have great storage in the greenhouse- either as a root cellar or as my wife puts it, a place to store sweaters in the summer.

Below is the compost furnace installed, notice the 2" rigid insulation over the part of the greenhouse that will be covered with brick flooring.
On top of the insulation I laid down landscape fabric and 4" of compacted gravel (see below). The insulation should keep the floor warm and restrict heat loss to the ground. Below, you can see the greenhouse floor and the separated part to my left is for a raised bed (on the south facing side of the greenhouse).

The next step is to lay down 1" of sand and install the brick flooring. The brick is 100-year old salvaged Missoula brick. It should make a really nice floor.

Native plant photo contest: one of my favorite flowers

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 Missoula's 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 don't 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).

Spring in our little prairie: what's flowering this week

Spring is coming slowly this year, and it is just a reminder of the importance of species diversity in our yard. Beginning with the sagebrush buttercup (Ranunculus glaberrimus) on March 14, we have plants that flower nearly all year.

Although it was snowing this afternoon, we have had flowers in bloom for over a month now, long before tulips will spring up in gardens. Spring is slowly arriving, but a few species are flowering and a lot more will be coming in the next weeks. Since only a hand full of species are in flower it is easy to keep tabs on them.

This first flowers are small (though structurally very diverse) but provide a sharp contrast to the otherwise dormant, winter-like appearance of Missoula. Above is the shooting star (Dodecatheon conjugens), and below is the pasque flower also known as the prairie crocus (Pulsatilla patens). The pasque flower will often flower in the snow.

The sagebrush buttercup (Ranunculus glaberrimus), the first to flower (below), and because of the cold and short days, it flowers for nearly a month. In the foreground of this picture (bottom, left) are leaves of the false dandelion (Agoseris glauca), the flower I picked for the Gardening Gone Wild photo contest.

Below is the yellow bell (Fritillaria pudica), a spring staple of the short grass prairie. Most these these early flowers typically have short lived blooms, and even their foliage may disappear soon. As a result they are great to accompany other plants, or hardscape features in the garden, as opposed to being a focal point, nor will the carry your garden. When they do appear, though often briefly, they are wonderful little surprises and reminders of the summer, full of flowers, to come.

Nesting update

The northern flickers are done excavating their box and the female (above) has been in the box for the last day or so. It is possible she is incubating eggs, but it seems like it might be a week early.
The really interesting thing this year is that the male (above) is a hybrid- a cross between a red- shafted northern flicker (the morph that is common in the western US) and a yellow-shafted northern flicker (the morph that is common in the eastern US). This male displays characteristics of both the red- and yellow-shafted northern flickers, which include a red malar (moustache) seen in the photo above (the yellow-shafted have a black malar).

He also has a red nape crescent (see photo above) only found in yellow-shafted flicker.

Though there is a well documented north flicker hybrid zone, which in the US roughly follows the a band on the east side of the Rocky Mountains, this is the first hybrid I have seen in Missoula, and it is further west then the hybrid zone would indicate. Though hybrids are said to be common through the range of northern flickers, I do wonder if the yellow-shafted, once confined to the eastern US and bounded by the Great Plains, is expanding westward.

This expansion is common in several other native and non-native species, including Eastern fox squirrels, and is due to a variety of reasons ranging from climate change, to urbanization, and conversion of prairies to forests. Since northern flickers use dead trees for nesting, changes in land use and cover, including fire suppression, planting trees, and alteration of flow regimes in rivers, have increased forests and woodland corridors, especially along riparian areas west of the Mississippi, this could lead to the yellow shafted penetrating further west (or the red-shafted going further east). Anyway, it is kind of silly to infer too much from seeing one hybrid.

The black-capped chickadees are nearly done excavating their box and soon will begin filling it with nesting material. We set out sphagnum moss and squirrels for them that they use to build their incredibly soft, warm nests. Click on the short video above to see the early stages of their excavating from last week.

If you watch you can see them take beak-fulls of sawdust from the box and fly off with it. They do this to scatter the excavated material so they to not attract pests or parasites. Nevertheless, I always enjoy watching them excavate!