Since buying the lot, I’ve been eager to start hunting, gathering and planting.
Family & Friends
My sisters, who are also plant people, have generously offered valuable advice and promises of plant material. Sister Mari has offered two small sassafras trees from her timber. They can be hard to transplant, so smaller is better, and we’ll wait until we have an exact location and the holes dug before moving them. Sister Cate has offered wahoo (the native version of burning bush), hazelnut, pussy willow and numerous other native shrubs and plants.
I’ve been gifted a pawpaw tree – thanks, Meredith!
Native Plant Society
Other plants may sprout from the seeds I’ve collected from the many native plants in the little yard surrounding my house. Some of those were donated by sisters – amsonia, coneflowers, bloodroot, lupine. Many originated from the Illinois Native Plant Society and the Central Chapter’s annual native plant sale. Two years ago, I purchased about 35 plugs that I planted on the south and west sides of the house after digging up lava rock and tough landscape fabric. Some of those include golden alexander, prairie petunia, royal catchfly, great blue lobelia, grey-headed coneflower, black-eyed susan, new jersey tea, wild quinine, sneezeweed, purple ironweed, and (the RED FLOWER I CAN’T REMEMBER THE NAME OF!) (PHOTOS COMING SOON)
Local Nurseries
I’ve been visiting local nurseries to look for the larger trees that will form the bones of the landscape. The red buckeye came from Pleasant Nursery and is awaiting planting in the front of the lot. (PHOTOS OF RED BUCKEYE AND HONEYLOCUST COMING SOON) I found a thornless honeylocust to match the two in my yard (to provide continuity and visually link the two lots together) at Hilltop Nursery. They will that plant the honeylocust for me in the parkway.
I’ve yet to find a pagoda dogwood (cornus alternafolia) for screening between my dining room windows and the neighbor across the lot. This will be the third house where I’ve planted this type of dogwood, which has fuzzy “snowball-ish” flowers instead of the single ones that are more generally popular. The sisters have a trip to Hoerr’s Nursery in Peoria planned for September – and I’m excited to see what interesting plants they may have.
End of Season Sales
The fence will be installed in November, so I’ll need to protect everything in that area before then. But now that the lot has been leveled and the grass planted, I feel it’s fairly safe to plant some things with little danger of them getting run down or stepped on.
To that end, I visited the Farmer’s Market plant place on Friday and found a haul of native forbs (flowers) in small pots on sale for $2 each – a real bargain. I’ve always loved shopping the end-of-season sales to expand my garden on a budget. The great thing about natives is that you can buy them small; they generally do pretty well and fill in the space quickly.
I selected colorful, easy-to-grow and relatively short plants because I intend to use them for the parkway. The parkway is the area between the street and the sidewalk – and that’s the subject of the next post.