Last June, during my visit to Denver with the Garden Bloggers’ Fling, I spent a little extra time in the fascinating Steppe Garden at Denver Botanic Gardens. I had been there once before during a late April visit when wild Tulipa greigii, Fritillaria pallidiflora and Iris bucharica from the Central Asian steppe were in flower. I blogged about my 2018 spring visit at the time.
But a year later, it had filled in nicely and I was fascinated with all the unusual plants. As DBG says on its website, “The Steppe Garden is an ambitiously diverse collection of tough and unique plants from steppe biomes, some of the most rugged habitats on Earth. This quarter-acre garden brings together the North American, South American, Central Asian and Southern African steppes to explore the diversity and similarities of their cold, dry grasslands and shrublands”. Designed by Didier Design Studio and installed in 2016, the garden is still filling in. The photo below (courtesy of Denver Botanic Gardens) shows an aerial view of the Steppe Garden as it was in 2017. I have numbered the individual gardens: 1) Patagonia; 2 and 3) Central Asia; 4) cultivated steppe (hybrids and plants influenced by human hands; 5) Southern Africa; and 6) Intermontane steppe of North America.
Drone aerial of the Steppe Garden – 2017
Let’s take a walk through, below. That’s South Africa on the left and the Central North American steppe of the Great Plains on the right. Denver, of course, is part of that steppe biome and DBG has focused on the unique ecology of steppe plants in this space.
As the sign says, the plants found in this garden are native to eastern Colorado and grow in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains.
In June, that means penstemons! Here we see a mix of lavender-purple Rocky Mountain penstemon (P. strictus), pink showy penstemon (P. grandiflorus) and wispy foxtail barley (Hordeum jubatum).
I grow showy penstemon myself at our cottage north of Toronto and I know what a tough hombre it is for dry, stony soil. But it looks so refined in the Steppe Garden, below.
Just outside the Steppe Garden itself is the Laura Smith Porter Plains Garden, featuring plants endemic to what was once native shortgrass prairie, with seeds sourced within 30 miles of Denver. Under the frieze here is soapweed yucca (Yucca glauca) and blue Nuttall’s larkspur.
Walk out the path and you get a feel for the shortgrass steppe or shortgrass prairie of the Great Plains. It’s these wonderful approximations of ‘what used to be’ that make Denver Botanic Gardens so special.
Here is Nuttall’s larkspur (Delphinium nuttallianum), named for Thomas Nuttall, the Yorkshire-born botanist who collected extensively in the United States from the Great Lakes to Kansas, Wyoming and Utah, then to California and Hawaii, followed by time in the Pacific Northwest.
Plains prickly pear cactus (Opuntia polyacantha), another shortgrass native, is in bloom in June.
Let’s go back into the Steppe Garden and enjoy this view over the water to the Central Asian Steppe Garden.
As the sign states, this is the largest steppe on the planet
Visitors walk through a microcosm of the species that grow in the Central Asian Steppe. I love that the gardens here look more like meadows than botanical garden collections, but each geographic section has been carefully sourced and the plantings designed by the Steppe Collections curator and plant explorer Michael H. Bone (more on Mike later).
The Altai mountains are in the Central Asian Steppe and located where China, Russia, Mongolia and Kazakhstan come together. And this is the Altai onion, Allium altaicum.
This is Angelica brevicaulis from the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan.
I love the Eurasian horned poppies (Glaucium corniculatum) and photographed them growing with roses in the garden of Panayoti Kelaidis, senior curator and director of outreach at Denver Botanic Gardens. (Read my blog on Panayoti’s Denver garden here.)
Most gardeners are very familiar with opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), which has long been naturalized in Central Asia, as well as many other regions of the world..
Phlomoides oreophila is a new plant for me, native from Central Asia to Northwest China.
Leaving the Central Asia Steppe, we come to a part of the garden that is still being developed, the South American Steppe, featuring the plants of Patagonia.
Looking over the water again, we see the main path through the Steppe Garden featuring two beautifully crafted stone sculptures. Behind is the South African Steppe.
Let’s take a closer look at the farthest sculpture, which is actually a beautiful water feature that serves as a special crevice garden for chasmophytes, i.e. plants that make their homes in narrow openings in rocky outcrops in the steppe regions. The open part is a trickling water fountain.
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Look at these little jewels! I photographed the plants below, including the lilac-flowered Iberis simplex (I. taurica), in April 2018. It grows in the Taurus Mountains in Southern Turkey.
Here is the top of the water feature in June 2019….
….. and another view. What exquisite stonework!
The South African Steppe is the star here, in my opnion, given DBG’s long history with plants from the region.. Let’s have a look at some of the plants, such as….
…. the strange-looking caterpillar grass (Harpochloa falx).
Apart from plants growing in the large, rocky structures, there are some beautiful container vignettes that will inspire visitors with restricted space – like this assemblage of species from southern Africa.
I love this border with blue cape forget-me-not (Anchusa capensis)and magenta ice plant (Delosperma cooperi).
Here’s a long view of this section in the South African Steppe.
South Africa, of course, represents the largest floristic province in the world, and the Steppe Garden divides plants into the Western South African Steppe….
…. and the much more lush Eastern South African Steppe.
There is a lot of fireweed (Senecio macrocephalus) in bloom in the eastern steppe in June.
And kniphofias, of course, are signature South African plants.
Look at this brilliant stone work.
Another grouping of containers highlights plants of the Eastern South African Steppe.
But Denver Botanic Gardens is famous for its ice plants, and they are featured prominently here in the part of the Steppe Garden devoted to garden introductions.
This one is called Delosperma Jewel of Desert Grenade. Isn’t it lovely?
More examples of the delosperma cultivated rainbow of colours, as seen in the South Africa Steppe.
I know I’ve probably missed a lot of detail and might even have mixed up the odd steppe region in my rush through the garden, but I do consider myself fortunate to have met the garden’s curator, Mike Bone, aka #steppesuns, below, this March in Toronto when he spoke to members of the Ontario Rock Garden Society. Mike is an enthusiastic plant propagator, seed collector and explorer who has spent decades working at DBG, acquiring plants from the four great steppe regions of the world and getting them displayed not just at his own garden, but other botanical gardens throughout the world. I know his mentor, Panayoti Kelaidis is very fond of Mike – or “Ghengis Bone” as he calls him in this blog he wrote about travelling with him in Mongolia.
They even collaborated on a 2015 book called Steppes: The Plants and Ecology of the World’s Semi-Arid Regions,co-authored by Dan Johnson (whose garden I blogged about recently), Mike Kintgen and Larry Vickerman, all of Denver Botanic Gardens. As the book’s description states, “steppes occupy enormous areas on four continents. Yet these ecosystems are among the least studied on our planet. Given that the birth and evolution of human beings have been so intimately interwoven with steppe regions, it is amazing that so few attempts have been made to compare and quantify the features of these regions.”
I’m so happy to have had the chance to visit DBG’s fascinating Steppe Garden, and look forward to exploring it in other seasons in the future.
After our lovely one-night stay at Abeja Inn and Winery in Walla Walla following our visit to Oregon’s John Day Fossil Unit National Monument, including the spectacular Painted Hills and the excellent Thomas Condon Paleontology Center, we headed north on Highway 12 in the direction of Spokane via Dayton and Colfax. My purpose in visiting this part of Washington State (apart from returning eventually to Vancouver to fly back home to Toronto) during our Pacific Northwest road trip was to see The Palouse. As a photographer I had admired my colleagues’ summer photos of the rolling green hills of the area. Even though driving through on September 11th meant there was little green to be seen, I was looking forward to visiting this unique place, one of the Seven Wonders of Washington.
Right away, we caught the flavour of the next several hours as we were flanked on both sides by wheat, wheat and more wheat. (Most of the following photos are through the window of our rental car, so if they’re not quite up to par, blame dirty windshields at 60 miles an hour.)
There was something so beautiful about these highway scenes, especially in mid-September when the wheat is nearing harvest. And make no mistake about it, this is big business. In the top 5 of wheat-producing states, Washington is #4 after #1 North Dakota, #2 Kansas, #3 Montana; Idaho is #5. In 2018, when we visited, wheat growers in Washington harvested 2.2 million acres of wheat with an average yield of 70.8 bushels per acre. Total production in the year was 153.2 million bushels with a value of $690 million. Of its total production, 85-90 percent is exported, compared with the overall US total of 46 percent. (Statistics from the Washington Grain Commission)
We passed grain elevators…..
….. and little farms. Though we passed this one at 60 miles an hour, I was delighted later to be able to make out the name in my image and read the story online. Just Another Chance Ranch near Waitsburg rescues horses and connects them in programs “to bring healing and purpose to youth”.
Between Waitsburg and Dayton, the characteristic rolling hills of the Palouse began to take shape behind the Columbia County Grain Growers Silo. The strip farming on the slope seems to be part of the strategy to conserve soil, a major concern in the region. More on that later.
We passed through the small town of Dayton.
For the most part we saw wheat, but here and there farmers grew other crops that stood out in sharp contrast to the sea of golden grain.
Wind farms dot the landscape in eastern Washington and Oregon. This is the Tucannon River Valley with the Hopkins Ridge Wind Farm.
The river valley sustains its share of agriculture. You can’t see the Tucannon River, a tributary of the Snake, but it’s winding beneath the hills.
We crossed the Snake River via the Elmer C. Huntley Central Ferry Bridge.
We were on Highway 127 now. I loved the little farms with their clusters of windbreak trees.
As we drove through the hills our vision was limited but I was sure I could see smoke from a fire in the distance. “Maybe a grass fire?” I said to my husband.
A few miles later, we discovered the source of “the smoke”. It was dust blowing from a farmer tilling his field. Fittingly, we were near the town of Dusty! This might be a good place to talk for a bit about soil conservation on the Palouse. Before farmers arrived from the east, the region was bunchgrass prairie, including bluebunch wheatgrass (which we saw in Oregon’s Painted Hills a few days earlier). Palouse wildflowers included arrowleaf balsamroot, biscuitroot, Lewis flax, prairie smoke, velvet lupine and sticky geranium. Wild roses grew among the grasses, as did serviceberry, hawthorn and chokecherry. The prairie yielded much of the traditional food and medicine for the indigenous people of the area, including the Palouse (Palus), Coeur d’Alene and Spokane Tribes. In 1855, a member of the surveying party of Isaac Stevens, a US Army officer and first Governor of the newly-created Washington Territory, wrote: “I will again say, we have been astonished today at the luxuriance of the grass and the richness of the soil. The whole view presents to the eye a vast bed of flowers in all their varied beauty. The country is a rolling tableland and the soil is like that of the prairies of Illinois.” But the arrival of the Army, the resultant Indian wars and subjugation of the local tribes spelled the end of the use of the virgin prairie for its natural gifts. Homesteaders arrived from the east in the 1860s and began to dig up the Palouse Prairie to plant crops. With the arrival of the railroad, farmers could ship their grain to points east, enabling large-scale wheat farming. By the time the disastrous 1920s Dust Bowl of the Midwest forced the nation to understand that the erosion of topsoil was caused by bad farming practices coupled with drought, wheat had been grown for a half-century in Washington State. But the Palouse was different: it was hilly, not flat, and the erosion came not just from wind but from winter snows. Without the roots of the native plants, the silty Palouse soil – called “loess”, which rhymes with “nurse” – was highly susceptible to hillside erosion. In 1930, the Pacific Northwest Soil Erosion Station at Pullman, Washington opened, one of ten to open in the U.S. under passionate conservationist Hugh Bennett, to study the “national menace” of soil erosion. Experimental plots were set up using major cropping and tilling systems and testing the run-off, while demonstration plots showed the benefits of good farming practices such as stopping summer fallow: i.e.leaving fields unplanted every other year, requiring excessive tillage of the stubble fields when the soil was at its wettest, causing it to wash away. (If you’re interested, you can read a fascinating memoir by William A. Rockie, the soil conservationist who set up the Pullman station.) Today, soil conservation remains an important focus in the Palouse where it is estimated that in just over a century of farming, half the soil has disappeared. Farmers are encouraged to do direct (no-till) seeding in the stubble mulch of the previous crop; to do contour strip farming, especially on slopes; and to plant cover crops. Steeper land can be placed into the USDA-funded Conservation Reserve Program, effectively paying land owners not to farm (though this program has unfortunately seen cutbacks recently).
With all that in mind, let’s get back to our road trip. Two-and-a-half hours after leaving Walla Walla, we were now 8 miles north of Colfax on Hume Road in sight of Steptoe Butte, a unique geologic formation in the Palouse.
A little while later and we were at the entrance to Steptoe Butte State Park. We parked on the access road so I could get out of the car and photograph it straight on. At a height of 1,100 feet (335 metres), it doesn’t exactly “loom” over the Palouse but it’s definitely the tallest thing around. It was named (alas) after the US Army Colonel Edward Steptoe, famous for his defeat (and retreat), along with his 164 men, by a combined force of one thousand Palouse, Coeur d’Alene and Spokane warriors during the 1858 Battle of Pine Creek. Despite being immortalized as the “Steptoe Disaster” the butte was named for him – and in fact became the archetype for other such geologic formations, where an island-like bedrock mountain protrudes through a lava flow, in this case a 400Ma Precambrian quartzite mountain protruding through the 16Ma Columbia River Basalt flow (see my previous blog). In 1946 pharmacist Virgil McCoskey, who had spent his childhood on the family farm at the base of Steptoe Butte and was passionate about retaining it as a natural feature, donated 120 acres (49 hectares) to form the state park, later increasing it to 150 acres . In 2016, Kent and Elaine Bassett purchased 437 acres (177 hectares) of the lower slopes to ensure its protection.
Let’s drive up Steptoe Butte. Here you see the native quartzite bedrock peeking through late summer grasses.
From Wiki: “Quartzite is a hard, non-foliated metamorphic rock which was originally pure quartz sandstone. Sandstone is converted into quartzite through heating and pressure usually related to tectonic compression within orogenic belts (during mountain building). Pure quartzite is usually white to grey, though quartzites often occur in various shades of pink and red due to varying amounts of iron oxide.”
We stopped partway up to get a sense of the mountain. Those transmission towers – or earlier versions – were erected when Virgil McCoskey was still involved, and he hated them. But you have to admit that the telecom companies found the ideal place.
Here are more colours of the native quartzite at the summit….
…. including pink-splashed rock at the precipice.
There is room for parking at the summit which at one time featured a hotel! Built in 1888 by English-born merchant James S. “Cashup” Davis (for cash upfront), it wasn’t exactly a roaring success. In time Davis lived alone there, hoping the odd guest might drive the winding road up the butte. He died in 1896, and in 1911 it burned down in a fire started by teens.
There are three interpretive signs at the top: one about Virgil McCroskey and Cashup’s Grand Hotel; one identifies the mountains visible in the distance in the Selkirk Range; and one explains….
….. the geology of Steptoe Butte.
I tried not to notice the telecommunications towers…..
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Now, with your permission, I’m going to geek out a little on crop pattern photography. I switched back and forth from my camera with the wide-angle lens to the one with the 70-200 F4 telephoto lens. I wanted the full panorama, but also the incredible texture of the fields
At first I was disappointed that I wasn’t going to be seeing the Palouse in early summer, when the crops reflect back a hundred shades of green. But then I realized there are hundreds of shades of brown as well.
The tracks made by the big combines in the shorn fields were like the nap of well-worn velvet.
From a thousand feet up, the farms and wheat trucks below could have been tiny toys.
I tried to imagine living in a farm down there in the Palouse, hoping for summer rain to water the grains and not getting any. Other years, seeing your seed and soil washed away in spring torrents.
Green gullies and winding roads were the seams in this undulating harvest cloth.
The combine patterns emphasized the contours of the loess hills.
In some respects the Palouse reminded me of the hills of Tuscany, only with Ponderosa pines instead of cypress trees.
The same combine tractor worked the crops below. And we would see it later as we headed out of the park.
Looking south, the view included a Douglas fir on the butte’s slope.
A hundred names for brown. Buff bronze ecru sepia ash camel taupe chocolate tan heather ochre…. and so many more. The colours obviously reflect the crops, but I couldn’t begin to separate them by hue. In the Palouse, they grow wheat in all its variety and gluten content. Soft white wheat, both winter and spring, is used in cakes and cereals and pastries. Hard red wheat is for breads and pizza crusts. Soft red winter wheat is best for pretzels. Durum is the wheat for pasta. Hard white represents ethnic menus, especially Asian noodles and steambreads. Barley grows here too. Lentils are a major crop, having arrived via seed from Europe in 1916. Farms in the Palouse now supply 95 percent of America’s lentils. Chickpeas are grown in the Palouse as well.
We headed back down the mountain but I begged to stop at a little clearing.
I wanted to fill my imagination with these fields….
….. and their captivating textures.
Off in the distance I could see more wind turbines.
I focused with my telephoto lens…..
….. and it occurred to me that the prairie wind that turns the blades that powers the turbines…..
…. is the same wind that carries away the silty soil of the Palouse into the air behind the blades of the big combines.
We got down to the bottom of the butte and met one of its resident deer skittering across the road.
No doubt it had been eating the apples in the historic old orchard nearby….
…. where no one was there to harvest them.
We laid out a picnic of the deli food I’d bought at the Safeway in Bend, Oregon, two days earlier, still cold thanks to the refrigerator in the well-stocked kitchen of Abeja Inn back in Walla Walla. Some things had even been transported all the way from the supermarket near my brother’s place outside Vancouver ten days ago. No one can accuse us of not being frugal on the road!
Then we headed north towards Spokane. Naturally there was road construction holding things up, but I didn’t mind.
Wheat fields and blue sky. What could be lovelier for a last stop on the highway in one of America’s most picturesque bread baskets, the Palouse.
For Tom Morrisey and Tina-May Luker, home is Lavender Hills Farm, a 25-acre property near Orillia in central Ontario, Canada.
Here, beautiful gardens….
….. and a custom-designed, bee-friendly, 2-acre tallgrass prairie meadow (seed-drilled ten years ago by their neighbors and friends Paul Jenkins and Miriam Goldberger of Wildflower Farm) supplement the natural softwood and hardwood forests and swamp that surround their farm.
Tom – who’s been a beekeeper for 40 years – tends 20 colonies at the farm, in addition to 110 colonies he manages in outyards in the region, for a total of 130 colonies. He calls himself a “sideline beekeeper”, but, of course, at one time he was a novice. He started out four decades ago working as part of the interpretive staff at a provincial park where the focus was agriculture and apple orchards. There was also a beehive under glass at the park – an observation hive – but no one on staff knew anything about bees. So Tom took a 5-day course at the University of Guelph (Ontario’s agricultural college) in order to explain to visitors the fine points about apple pollination. Later, he moved to the Orillia area and started working in adult education at a local college.
As he recalls now, he looked around at all the farms in the area and thought, “I don’t know anything about farming, but I know about beekeeping!” So he bought a couple of colonies and began keeping bees as a hobby. After working for a while in Ontario’s Ministry of Natural Resources, he went travelling internationally. When he returned to Canada, he met Tina-May Luker and told her he wanted a job where he could ride his bicycle to work. He knocked on the door of commercial beekeeper John Van Alten of Dutchman’s Gold Honey (and later president of the Ontario Beekeepers Association) and offered his services. Two days later, he was hired to help manage between 800-1200 hives.
When he and Tina-May moved back to the Orillia area seventeen years ago, they bought their farm and Tom began beekeeping in earnest, with 50 colonies the first year and another 50 a year later. His farm beeyard is adjacent to the tall-grass meadow and surrounded by electric fencing to deter black bears.
The remainder are situated in a half-dozen outyards within an hour’s drive, with between 10-30 hives at each location. The outyards include a commercial cranberry bog, below,……
…..and a wildflower farm. His honey house at the farm is a converted double garage several hundred feet from the beeyard and close to the driveway so the honey supers can easily be unloaded from his pickup truck after a trip to the outyards.
That brings us to one of Tom’s favorite beekeeping gadgets, and one he devised himself. “In my pickup I put a piece of plywood with a little bit of a rim around it, sort of like a picture frame, and put some loops of wire into that, and that allowed me to use straps to tie down all my frame. It’s terrific, and only cost fifty bucks for lumber.”
Tom has another favorite piece of equipment, his “Mr. Long Arm”. That’s an extendable painter’s pole at the end of which he has fashioned something like a butterfly net made of fence brace wire threaded through the seamed end of a heavy-duty plastic shopping bag. “When it’s extended its full length of twelve feet,” he says, “I can often retrieve swarms that have settled well above me in the branches near my beeyards. The bees can’t grip the smooth plastic so I just shake them out into a brood box on the ground. No more ladders for me!”
As for those swarms, he says: “You can use that whole impulse to swarm to make more colonies of bees, if you want them. If you don’t want them, then you’ve got to be very diligent to manage your colonies so they don’t get crowded.”
Tom started raising queens a few years ago and finds it an engrossing learning experience. “It’s not something a beginner usually tackles, but at some point you get enough confidence to try it, and it’s very interesting. The whole idea is to try to select bees that have the characteristics that I like working with and to give me a supply of queens early in the season when they’re very handy to have.”
In spring, his bees find willows and red maple in the plentiful swamps around one of the outyards, where thawing occurs earlier than other places. At the farm, local basswood trees (Tilia americana), below, provide a good flow and produce excellent honey about three out of five years.
Abundant staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) feeds the bees and the red fruit clusters provide the fuel for Tom’s smoker.
There’s clover and alfalfa in neighboring farm fields and birdsfoot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus) and viper’s bugloss (Echium vulgare), below, growing wild along the country roads.
Tina-May’s borders and vegetable garden provide lots of nectar and pollen from plants like Oriental poppy (Papaver orientale), butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa), lavender (Lavandula angustifolia)……
….. and asparagus that’s gone to flower with its bright orange pollen.
In the designed meadow, masses of coreopsis give way to purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum), blazing-star (Liatris pycnostachya and L. ligulistylis). The final act, lasting from August well into October, stars the goldenrods, and Tom and Tina-May grow four species including stiff goldenrod (Solidagorigida, syn. Oligoneuron rigidum), below,
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…. rough-leaved goldenrod (Solidago rugosa)….
…..and the very late-flowering showy goldenrod (Solidago speciosa), below.
Says Tom: “Goldenrod is a good honey, very dark and somewhat strong tasting. The bees produce a bright yellow wax when they’re collecting goldenrod.” But this late flowering of the goldenrods and native asters also helps the health of the hive, as Tom explains. “There’s an expression that it’s really good to have ‘fat bees’ going into winter, meaning bees that are really well-fed. And being stimulated by a good flow of nectar and pollen allows them to make the physiological changes they need for winter. Bees in the summer, they’re flying around, they last six weeks, then they die. But in the winter, they have to sit in a hive, they don’t go out for six months, so their whole body, essentially, has to work in a different fashion.”
Most years, Tom’s colonies winter very well, with his survival rates matching or bettering the provincial average. “I make sure the bees are well fed, because that stimulates them to keep brooding up later in the season. So I feed them in the fall. And I make sure the mites are under control.” Here’s a little video* I made of Tom explaining how he checks for varroa mites. (*If you’re reading this on an android phone and cannot see the video, try switching from “mobile” to “desktop”. Not sure why that glitch occurs.)
Honey extraction begins in late July and extends well into October.
From time to time, Tom enlists the help of family members like brother-in-law Paul Campbell, seen assisting him below.
Here’s a video I made of Tom and Paul at this time in late summer moving the honey frames for extraction.
Over the years, Tom has automated his honey harvest to lighten the load, but it’s still hot, sticky, noisy work, with rock music blaring from speakers above the clatter of the hot knives of the decapping machine….
…..and the whirring of the horizontal extractor.
Here’s a video I made of the honey extraction process at Lavender Hills Farm. Because it’s hard to hear Tom over the machinery and the music, I put in a few subtitles.
Tom and Tina-May, below, are regulars at four farmers’ markets in the area….
….selling honey, mustard, honey butter, herbal soap, candles, and treats like honey straws that children love. “Farmers’ markets are a great place to get to know your customers and build a steady market for your product,” says Tom. “People want to know that you’re the beekeeper, and they want to hear stories about keeping bees, just like I’m telling stories now.”
It’s a demanding occupation with lots of tiring physical work and he gets stung “dozens of times a day, sometimes”. And the challenges are many now. “When I started,” he recalls, “There were no parasitic mites, viruses weren’t an issue, and agri-chemicals didn’t seem to be as big a factor. You could put a box of bees in the back of the farm, they’d winter all right, and you’d get a box of honey. It’s certainly changed in the past twenty years.”
One of the newest factors is small hive beetle, and though it’s been seen in the Niagara region, it hasn’t yet made it this far north. However he’s heard talk of beekeepers arranging refrigerated storage for their honey frames
But Tom is still enthralled with the whole thing. “Keeping bees is a very elemental occupation. The bees are subject to all the natural forces around them, from the plants to the weather and all the variations in between. It’s one expression of nature that you can roll up your sleeves and get right into. And that’s very enjoyable, because every year is different.”
If there’s one piece of advice he’d give to a new beekeeper, it’s this: “Get two hives, not just one, because of the chance of you either making a mistake or nature dealing you a blow that might take one of your hives, but you’ll always have another one.”
And that could be the beginning of a very long love affair.
***********
This story is a much-expanded version of an article that appeared earlier this year in a beekeeping magazine. It’s a joy to know both Tom Morrisey and Tina-May Luker, below, with me at the Gravenhurst Farmer’s Market on Lake Muskoka this summer.
It was with great joy that I stepped into Chicago’s Lurie Garden last August. It didn’t matter that my companions numbered in the hundreds (garden communicators from all over North America at the annual Gardencomm symposium) – as long as they didn’t get in my shot! And it was the perfect time to visit, with the Lurie evoking in a romantic, chaotic way the wildflower-spangled prairie that once stretched across sixty one percent of Illinois (21.6 million acres), before the arrival in the 1830s of homesteaders and the John Deere tractor that broke up the tallgrass sod to plant beans and barley. No, the Lurie Garden is not a prairie recreation, and it’s certainly not ‘country’, given that it occupies five leafy acres of 24.5-acre Millennium Park in the heart of downtown, framed by some of the tallest skyscrapers in North America.
But when you see the artful tumble of some of the tallgrass prairie’s iconic natives, such as spiky rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuccifolium)….
…. and towering yellow compass plant (Silphium laciniatum), its common name alluding to the belief of pioneers that its leaves always pointed north and south,…..
…… mixed with other perennials and lush ornamental grasses in the Meadow section of the garden nearest Monroe Street, it certainly feels like walking into an August prairie in the middle of the city.
It was spring 1914 when poet Carl Sandburg wrote his ode to Chicago. Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders
And it was the last line of that first verse and the nickname it lent Chicago – City of Big Shoulders – that landscape architects Gustafson Guthrie Nichol lit on in the late 1990s when they conceptualized the space that would become the Lurie Garden. Those “big shoulders” became the 15-foot high shoulder hedge, an L-shaped living wall separating the garden from the busy footpath to the Frank Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Music Pavilion (see the steel roof angles) and Great Lawn in the space beyond.
Comprised of five cultivars of arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis) and hedge-friendly hornbeam (Carpinus betulus ‘Fastigiata’) and European beech (Fagus sylvatica), the shoulder hedge also echoes those other big shoulders of the towering skyscrapers behind Millennium Park. By the way, that’s a cultivar of white-flowered prairie native Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum) in the foreground with a purple cloud of sea lavender (Limonium latifolium) nearby.
For Dutch superstar designer Piet Oudolf, the Lurie plant design was his first commission in the U.S. and his first big public garden, though later he would design the plantings for the High Line in New York (which I blogged about in June 2014), our own entry border at the Toronto Botanical Garden (which I blogged about in March 2017 including the intricate design nuts-and-bolts) and the Delaware Botanic Gardens at Pepper Creek (opening this September), among others. When he became the perennial plant designer of the winning Lurie design team under Seattle-based landscape architects Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd. (GGN) at the turn of the millennium and had his plant list prepared, he travelled to Chicago to meet with nurseryman Roy Diblik, owner of Northwind Perennial Farm in nearby Burlington, Wisconsin. Roy had already read Gardening with Grasses, the book Piet co-authored with Michael King in 1998, one of many design books he has written; it astonished him. As he said in a 2016 interview on The Native Plant Podcast, “It was the first book I’ve ever seen about grasses intermingled with other plants. This book showed communities, how to interplant, playfulness. It was wonderful.”
Roy Diblik, below left, recalls their first meeting in the biographical Oudolf Hummelo – A Journey Through a Plantsman’s Life (2015 ) by Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury: “I remember how he rolled out a copy of a plan for the Lurie Garden on a workbench. I could see immediately that there had never been anything like this before in the Midwest. We went through the plants, what would work, and not work. He got me involved in producing the plants – 28,000 plants, with no substitutes. We subcontracted the growing of the easier plants and I did the more difficult ones myself.” For his part, Piet had never seen a prairie before and Roy loved the prairie and its plants deeply, so he took his Dutch visitor to visit the Schulenberg Prairie at the Morton Arboretum, a very moving experience for Piet. So it was natural that they became more than design collaborators; they became close friends. The professional collaboration continues today, since every two years the Lurie invites them and the landscape architects to visit the garden, inspect the plants and assess how they’re performing……
Roy Diblik, left, and Piet Oudolf, right. Photo courtesy of Laura Ekasetya
…… in a consultation that includes Director/Head Horticulturist Laura Ekasetya, below, part of the formidable all-woman team at the Lurie.
To place the Lurie in context, you can see below in this amazing July image by Devon Loerop Media the Seam, the Light Plate and Dark Plate and beyond the garden, people sitting on the Great Lawn enjoying a performance at the Pritzker Pavilion under the airy overhead trellis containing the sound system.
Devon Loerop Media courtesy of Lurie Garden
Looking the other way in another image by Devon Loerop Media, you see Renzo Piano’s beautiful Modern Wing of the Chicago Art Institute, whose windows look directly onto the undulating garden, its sloping, prairie-like meadow and gardens and trees like some ever-changing work of modern art.
Devon Loerop Media courtesy of Lurie Garden
On a hot day last August, just beyond the bee-buzzy cloud of white calamint (Calamintha nepeta), there were young visitors cooling their feet in the water course, just out of view, that bisects the Lurie as part of the “Seam”, GGN’s evocative separation of the garden into the Light and Dark Plates. The Light Plate, left, is the sunny prairie-like side; the Dark Plate features a more garden-inspired design with many plants growing in dappled shade under black locust trees (Robinia pseudoacacia). In between on the Dark Plate side is an area called the Transition Zone, with tall plants.
The water course is part of stepped pools underlying the broad ipe wood walkway that carries visitors through the garden. But what exactly did the landscape architects intend to evoke with the Seam? Most of the waders would not understand that this is a sophisticated means of connecting the Lurie with the underlying landscape.
Not the immense parking garage immediately below – since Millennium Park is a massive green roof, the largest in the world. Not the ghost of the old Illinois Central Railway tracks below. Rather, it evokes the swampy marshland in the delta of the Chicago River that once led into Lake Michigan just a few blocks away, atop which young Chicago grew in the early 19th century. By 1900, the river would be reversed to flow ultimately into the Mississippi River, but it was a muddy beginning for the young city that necessitated a gigantic engineering project and wooden walkways to ensure that the big-shouldered city and its citizens did not sink into the mire. That’s the history conjured up by The Seam.
The Raising of Chicago was undertaken after outbreaks of cholera in 1854 and ’59 killed more than two thousand people. It involved the use of jackscrews to lift entire streets of buildings six feet above ground. Below is an artist’s 1856 rendering of the plan to raise Lake Street. Connecting historic events like this with a contemporary landscape like the Lurie is perhaps the finest interpretation of capturing a ‘sense of place’. Read more about Gustafson Guthrie Nichol’s design rationale for the Light and Dark Plates and the Seam here.
Image – Chicago Historic Society – Edward Mendel
The plants for the wildish front section of the Lurie may evoke the prairie, but Piet prefers to call this the Meadow. As Noel Kingsburgy wrote in Oudolf Hummelo: “At the time Piet created the Lurie Garden, it represented a new level of complexity and sophistication in his design. It drew on a number of elements that had proved successful elsewhere, but it also contained several innovations. The bulk of the planting is formed of like plants clumped together, although there is a small area of innovative intermingled planting at the southern end, known as The Meadow, where species are mixed in a truly naturalistic fashion. Its matrix of ornamental grasses including the native Sporobolus heterolepis, is broken at intervals by a number of perennial species that rise up above the grasses….” The matrix system would inspire Piet a few years later in his design for the High Line. Many of the plants in the Meadow are native prairie plants, but not all. The lovely white coneflower below is Echinacea ‘Virgin’, one of Piet Oudolf’s own introductions.
Grasses are chosen for their hardiness, beauty and architectural durability, regardless of whether they’re native species, non-natives or selected cultivars. Here is the Meadow’s matrix grass, the lovely tallgrass native prairie dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis).
Award-winning ‘Blonde Ambition’ blue grama (Bouteloua gracilis), below, has striking pennant-like flowers and grassy, blue-gray foliage.
Autumn moor grass (Sesleria autumnalis), on the other hand, is a European grass that Piet knew well from previous designs. In June, it’s the soft, chartreuse framework for the Lurie’s spectacular purple-blue “salvia river”, and in summer, it enhances purple coneflowers and cloudlike, white-flowered prairie spurge (Euphorbia corollata).
Here is autumn moor grass nestling the tallgrass prairie forb wild petunia (Ruellia humilis).
Grasses also frame another typical prairie denizen, nodding onion (Allium cernuum).
‘Karl Foerster’ feather reed grass (Calamagrostis x acutiflora) may be the most commonly-seen ornamental grass in North America now, but it creates the perfect vertical accent below. It is named for the renowned Germany nurseryman and plant breeder Karl Foerster (1874-1970) who in turn was the teacher of Piet’s own friend, the late nurseryman and plant breeder Ernst Pagels (1913-2007). Pagels introduced many plants we see in Oudolf gardens, including Salvia nemorosa ‘Amethyst’ ‘Blauhügel’ and other sages; Phlomis tuberosa ‘Amazone’; Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Diane; Astilbe chinensis var. taquetii ‘Purpurlanze’; and, in honour of Piet, award-winning Stachys officinalis ‘Hummelo’.
One of the paradoxes of the surge in popularity of American native plants and their selections is that much of the work was done in Germany and Holland. ‘Shenandoah’ switch grass (Panicum virgatum), below, with its rich red foliage, was selected by another of Piet’s friends, German plantsman Hans Simon. Here it is with the ferny foliage of Arkansas bluestar (Amsonia hubrichtii) and Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’, a superb hybrid of North American anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum) and Korean Agastache rugosa, bred and selected by Gert Fortgens at Rotterdam’s Arboretum Trompenberg.
The ‘Blue Fortune’ anise hyssop was attracting hordes of monarch butterflies the day I was there, and the photographers in the crowd were vying for the perfect shot.
Pennisetum alopecuroides ‘Cassian’ is an excellent, hardy fountain grass named for Piet’s friend, Cassian Schmidt, director of the renowned German garden Hermannshof.
A signature plant in Piet’s gardens is airy sea lavender (Limonium latifolium), seen here with a tiny sprig of prairie spurge (Euphorbia corollata).
Nearby was a drift of early-blooming pale purple coneflower (Echinacea pallida), their pink flowers now bronzed with age. Seedheads and senescing plants, of course, are a vital part of the four-season design that Piet has promoted in his gardens, adding structure to plantings and an evocative, almost metaphorically human sense of “a life well lived” . As he told a New York Times writer more than a decade ago: “You accept death. You don’t take the plants out, because they still look good. And brown is also a color.”
The seedheads of Allium lusitanicum ‘Summer Beauty’, a Roy Diblik plant introduction, still looked wonderful, especially framing Echinacea ‘Pixie Meadowbrite’.
Wild quinine (Parthenium integrifolium) is a tallgrass prairie perennial whose flowerheads were slowly turning tawny.
Under the trees in the Dark Plate, the brown seedheads of Phlomis tuberosa ‘Amazone’ added a strong note of verticality.
Touring visitors through the Lurie, as Laura Ekasetya was doing here, often means explaining Piet’s philosophy, since people don’t always appreciate the beauty of plants once the flowers fade. Birds do, of course, and seeds of many perennials offer nourishment to songbirds long after summer ends.
And even without their purple flowers, the tall spikes of prairie blazing star (Liatris pycnostachya) are simply spectacular, and will be prominent well into winter.
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But the liatris season is long, and the knobby flowers of rough blazing star (Liatris aspera) were just opening……
….. bringing native insects to nectar. This is the two-spotted longhorn bee.
The Lurie attracts a diverse roster of insects to forage on the flowers. Native skullcap (Scutellaria incana) was being visited by a lumbering carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica), while…..
….. tall ‘Gateway’ Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium maculatum) was entertaining monarchs, as was….
….. the ‘Diane’ Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum).
In fact, monarch butterflies were even mating on the common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) that had been left in a few spots in the garden to ensure enough food for the monarch’s larval caterpillars.
Although I’m a prairie girl at heart, I finally dragged myself away from the sunny Light Plate into the shade-dappled Dark Plate. Here, the planting is less meadow-like and more refined, much as you would find in garden borders.
And I loved the chickadees that were flitting through the trees. Here’s a little taste….
The perennials in this section appreciate richer soil and a little more moisture, too. Below is Heuchera villosa ‘Autumn Bride’ with Aruncus ‘Horatio’ having formed seedheads behind. Pink Japanese anemones are at the rear.
I could smell the perfume of the summer phlox (Phlox paniculata) even before I arrived at the spot where it was flowering. In every possible shade of pink, it was paired perfectly with Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium spp.).
Great blue lobelia (Lobelia siphilitica) made a good companion to the phlox. Summer phlox is one of those native North American perennials that enjoyed early cosmopolitan success in the 18th century when plants were collected in the “new world” and shipped to Europe. It was John Bartram who found it growing near Pennsylvania’s Brandywine River in 1732, and sent it to England, where it soon found its way into estate borders and cottage gardens throughout Europe. Though it is occasionally susceptible to disease (and voracious groundhogs in my own Toronto garden, where I haven’t seen a bloom in years), it is such a lovely mid-late summer perennial and romantically ebullient and perfumed.
In fact, it was in this part of the garden where Piet Oudolf and Roy Diblik noticed a phlox, below, that had seeded from the original planting of a named variety. It was clear pink and exhibited excellent characteristics. After watching it for a few years, they had it dug up in 2016 and taken to Brent Horvath of Instrinsic Perennial Gardens (IPG) in nearby Hebron, one of the midwest’s finest wholesale perennial growers. In honour of the Lurie’s Director and Head Horticulturist, Piet named it ‘Sweet Laura.’ And as Laura Ekasetya says, “He is including this plant in the new edition of (his book) Dream Plants for the Natural Garden.” IPG propagated cuttings in 2017 and 2018 and it is now sold locally and at the Lurie Garden’s May plant sale.
Courtesy Intrinsic Perennial Garden
As I was reluctantly leaving the garden to return to the symposium at the over-air-conditioned convention centre, I saw a honey bee landing on Geranium soboliferum, Japanese cranebill, below. It cheered me up as I was planning to return on my own later that day to meet someone special at the Lurie.
IT WAS 2011 WHEN I proposed a story on urban beekeeping to Organic Gardening magazine, which has sadly since folded. The story featured three expert beekeepers and their shared wisdom about the ancient art and science of beekeeping. One was Michael Thompson, beekeeper for the hives on the rooftop of Chicago City Hall and also the Lurie Garden. But beekeeping (read this Edible Chicago article on Michael and his history with honey bees) and being co-founder and director of the Chicago Honey Co-op is just one of Michael’s journeys in life; he also works with urban agriculture (including an urban orchard project), especially in parts of the city where organically-grown vegetables and neighbourhood involvement are a departure from the norm. When I was making my plans to travel to Chicago, I contacted Michael to ask if there was a chance we could meet in person. We agreed on a time and I made my way back to the Lurie that afternoon. After arriving on his bike in sweltering temperatures, Michael donned his veil and began inspecting the hives.
Brood and honey looked good for August, a product of the Lurie’s abundance of nectar- and pollen-rich plants (not to mention urban street trees throughout Grant Park and downtown).
Among the plants I’d noticed earlier with honey bees were Japanese anemones (pollen only, which bumble bees also collect)….
…. Knautia macedonica, which yields magenta-pink pollen…..
…. Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Diane’), which is a superb plant for native pollinators too….
…. calamint (Nepeta calamintha), which honey bees adore…..
…. and mountain mint (Pycnanthemum muticum), which attracts honey bees and other pollinators in droves.
But apart from seeing the beehive inspection, I wanted to meet Michael in the flesh here at the Lurie, to cement one more personal connection in this wonderful world of flora that we all cherish.
And after receiving my gift of Chicago Co-op honey….
…I went back into the Lurie, now comparatively empty of people. And I thought of the friends I was with on this symposium, people I’ve come to know in the thirty years I’ve been immersed in gardens, like Helen Battersby, who co-produces with her sister an award-winning blog called Toronto Gardens…..
….. and Theresa Forte, who writes a column for the St. Catharine’s Standard (and is a proud grandmother like me). Behind her is Portlander Kate Bryant, who generously drove me around her fair city visiting gardens last year, not long after our Lurie visit.
I’d shared a Lurie stone wall at lunch with horticulturist Anne Marie Van Nest, a longtime friend who gardens at Niagara Parks and Quebec’s Larry Hodgson, who writes, photographs and leads tours en Français to gardens throughout the world.
I thought of the people who grow all the plants and tend all the gardens, like Intrinsic’s Brent Horvath and his partner, Chicago Botanic Garden’s Lisa Hilgenberg, who manages the edible gardens there. I would meet them at the symposium dinner later that week.
And I thought of people directly related to this very garden’s design ethos, and a fun dinner in 2016 hosted by the New Perennialist himself, Tony Spencer, standing left, with me, plantsman David Leeman, special guest Roy Diblik and nurseryman Jeff Mason of Mason House Gardens. Tony also began the Facebook group Dutch Dreams, and has become a good friend of Piet Oudolf over the years.
Those are just a few of the many hundreds of people I’ve met and become friends with in three decades. As I walked through the Meadow again, looking up at the compass plants giving the nearby skyscrapers a run for their money,……
….. I thought about spring 1999, when I’d visited Hummelo and photographed Piet Oudolf on the eve of the new millennium. He would begin the Lurie design process just a year or so later. And of this garden, about which he said in a Tom Rossiter video recently, “The Lurie Garden created a moment in my life where I stepped over a threshold and came into another idea of design. For sure it has affected my work. And it has done a lot of good in my personal experience and it’s done a lot of good in my designs, in particular to touch people’s emotions.”
If there are big shoulders in cities, there are big shouldered people in the world of gardening and design as well. We stand on their shoulders and learn from them, and they sometimes learn from us. It is a rarified world rendered infinitely interesting by the changing of the seasons and by the way it touches our emotions. And we are all so very fortunate to live (and work) here.
Happy 15th anniversary, Lurie Gardens and Millennium Park.
*********
Please leave a comment. I’d love to know what you think of the Lurie, too!
You know that feeling of pride you get when a friend receives a well-deserved award? I feel exactly that way about an outstanding prairie wildflower that I’ve been growing here in my meadows on Lake Muskoka for many years. So, when I heard that The Perennial Plant Association chose my very favourite perennial – butterfly milkweed, Asclepias tuberosa — to be their 2017 Plant of the Year, I decided to honour it with my own blog.
The PPA award is not the first laurel to be bestowed on this lovely wildling. In 2014, it was awarded the Freeman Medal by the Garden Clubs of America, as a native deserving of wider garden planting. And the GCA president asked me if I would donate my photo of a monarch butterfly on the flowers, below, which I was happy to do (see down this page).
Despite the plaudits, butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) is not the easiest perennial to grow, unless you happen to garden on a sand prairie. It has a deep tap root that makes it rather difficult to transplant. And seeds are often notoriously slow to germinate and grow, sometimes taking 5 years to grow enough to set flower buds. But give it a little rich, free-draining, gravelly soil and lots of sunshine, and watch the pollinating insects pile on. Foremost, of course, is the beautiful monarch butterfly, which uses it – as it does all milkweed species – as food for its caterpillars. If you’re lucky, you might see the female monarch ovipositing on its leaves or flowers.
Come back and you’ll see the little egg on a leaf….
… or perhaps right in the flowers.
Follow along over the next few weeks and you’ll see the various instars of the developing caterpillar munching away on the leaves….
…. and the flower buds.
But monarchs aren’t the only butterflies fond of butterfly milkweed. Many others love the nectar-rich flowers, including the great spangled fritillary…
…. hairstreaks, below, and many others.
Bees love it too. On my property, I often see the orange-belted bumble bee (Bombus ternarius) nectaring….
….and the brown-belted bumble bee (Bombus griseocollis), too.
Here’s a little video I made of the brown-belted bumble bee foraging on my butterfly milkweed. In the background, you can hear a red squirrel scolding and a lovely Swainson’s thrush singing its flute-like song.
Naturally, many native bees seek nectar from butterfly milkweed. I’ve seen long-horned (Melissodes) bees….
…. and tiny, green sweat bees (Auguchlora pura), all enjoying the flowers.
Honey bees are avid foragers, too.
Seek doctor’s advice before thinking to act.* If you want to get treated for alcohol addiction or drug abuse, you can get effective treatment in these rehab cheap cialis 5mg centers. Precautions This drug ought to be generic cialis in canada used by an impotence victim not by anyone else, not even a disorder. This process accentuates the production of contractile proteins which are used to make your muscle contract more forcefully, as well as structural proteins that are present sildenafil generico online naturally in the body. Human growth hormone or HGH is a hormone controlled canada tadalafil djpaulkom.tv by your pituitary gland. Okay, you get the picture. This is one superb pollinator plant! But how should one grow it, and with what companions? I have grown it in both reasonably rich, sandy soil, and very dry, lean, sandy soil, and I can attest that it prefers more moisture than other prairie plants, such as gaillardia and coreopsis. This is what it looked like near my septic system this July. I managed to keep it watered by running two hoses up the hill behind my cottage, but it was a struggle until a few rains came.
However, if summer rains are abundant, it’s happy with those more drought-tolerant natives. Here it is growing very wild in dry soil with Coreopsis lanceolata.
And it does well in fairly dry conditions with Anthemis tinctoria.
On the other hand, it does well in reasonably rich soil with my Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’, where I can run the hose if rains don’t come (like this summer)…..
…. and peeking up through my grassy monarda meadow, near a lush pink lily.
I’ve grown it with Penstemon barbatus ‘Coccineus’….
…and with blackeyed susans (Rudbeckia hirta).
And I’ve seen it looking pretty with daylilies and catmint in a friend’s garden, too.
Butterfly milkweed’s blooming season is so long, it counts numerous July and August plants as companions. Here is a bouquet I photographed on July 17th, 2010 with blackeyed susans (Rudbeckia hirta), false oxeye (Heliopsis helianthoides), veronica (Veronica spicata ‘Darwin’s Blue’) and blue vervain (Verbena hastata).
… and a collection of little bouquets I made on August 16th, 2013.
If you want to know absolutely everything that might flower at the same time, here’s a montage I made one year on July 7th, 2014. Yes, that’s butterfly milkweed near the lower right corner. See if you can guess the rest!
I have planted dozens of young butterfly milkweed plants here at Lake Muskoka over the years, like these ones offered by the Canadian Wildlife Federation (along with suitable nectar plants), as an encouragement to ‘bring back the monarch butterfly’. Most took, provided I irrigated them for the first summer; a few didn’t.
But I have also managed to grow many from seed, which is harvested from the typical milkweed fruit capsule. The ones that were most successful were those I guerilla-sowed, using the toe of my boot to kick them in along the edge of a gritty, community pathway midway down the hillside on a neighbour’s property. Under that granitic gravel, below, there was actually rich sandy soil and adequate moisture, given that the path sits mid-slope on the hill. But this tough environment best replicates the natural ‘sand prairie’ that butterfly milkweed likes.
You can also buy a seed mix in multiple colours: ‘Gay Butterflies Mix’, below.
Want to try your hand sowing butterfly milkweed? Follow these seeding instructions in a propagation guide in the Minnesota newsletter of Wild Ones: “Collect when pods are cracked open. Remove down; cold stratify in fridge in damp sand for 90 days. Broadcast on soil surface in spring when soil is warm.”
Best of luck growing this worthy award winner! You and the pollinators – including the lovely monarch butterfly – are worth the effort.
