Big and Tall Sunny Garden Design
Garden at a glance:
Sun-loving plants (see list below)
Mix of our most popular tall pollinator plants
Attracts huge amounts of monarchs and butterflies
This garden will plant an area from 10ft x 10ft up to 10ft x 15ft
How to design and plant:
This garden has been designed with enough species that no matter where you place the plants, they’ll create complimentary blooms
Mix the grasses and sedges throughout the garden to provide soft textures to balance out the more chunky flower leaves
All plants can be planted 15 inches apart
Materials and Supplies:
Plants - you can buy this as a pre-made garden kit or purchase the plants as pots separately. The garden kit is cheaper but the pots are larger, more mature plants.
3” of wood mulch (1 cubic yard, or 14 bags of 2 cubic foot mulch). Wood mulch reduces weeds, reduces watering to just 3-5 times the first year, and nearly doubles plant growth—well worth the extra work (a few hours) and cost (about $40 for a 10ft x 10ft area).
Paper weed-block rolls or cardboard or newspaper to put underneath the mulch. Do not use plastic!
Edging - 5” deep plastic edging or blocks.
Sticks or popsicle sticks to mark the plants. Plastic labels will break over time.
Plants needed:
Flowers:
3 Marsh Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata)
3 Aromatic Aster (Aster oblongifolius)
3 New England Aster (Aster novae-angliae)
3 Blue Wild Indigo (Baptisia australis)
3 Lance Leaf Coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata)
3 Pale Purple Coneflower (Echinacea pallida)
6 Meadow Blazing Star (Liatris ligulistylis)
3 Prairie Blazing Star (Liatris pycnostachya)
3 Wild Bergamot (Monarda fistulosa)
3 Prairie Phlox (Phlox pilosa)
3 Yellow Coneflower (Ratibida pinnata)
3 Orange Coneflower (Rudbeckia fulgida)
3 Royal Catchfly (Silene regia)
3 Compass Plant (Silphium laciniatum)
3 Grey Goldenrod (Solidago nemoralis)
3 Culver's Root (Veronicastrum virginicum)
Grasses and Sedges:
6 Side-oats Grama (Bouteloua curtipendula)
6 Prairie Sedge (Carex brevior)
3 Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparius)
6 Prairie Dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis)
What to expect (A Garden Journal):
The big and tall sunny garden includes our favorite tall prairie plants. What it lacks in spring blooms it makes up for in late summer and fall flowers. These plants tend to spread over time by seed, creating a mix of bloom colors throughout the garden.
In spring, the Prairie Sedge will start to re-sprout right when the snow melts. Sedges are like grasses but have triangle stems. Most are cool-season and like to grow when the weather is colder, just like lawn grasses, which is a welcome sight when so many other native plants are still dormant.
In late May the Prairie Phlox will bloom, with bunches of light pink flowers. It’s an important food source for small skipper butterflies, which are often active on warm spring days.
The sprouts of Blue Wild Indigo look like asparagus shoots when they first come out of the ground. It is a legume, a nitrogen-fixer, and helps put nitrogen fertilizer back into the soil. It has deep blue flowers on tall stems but it is a very slow bloomer and might take 2-3 years to bloom and become a mature clump. In the winter, the leaves turn almost black and it looks nice in the snow.
Blanket Flower will bloom throughout the summer. The blooms can have many different colors and patterns, just like a Native American blanket. It can be a short-lived perennial, only living for a few years, but it spreads easily by seed and continues growing in gardens.
June and July provides more color throughout the garden. A great color combination is the pink Pale Purple Coneflower and next to the yellow Lance Leaf Coreopsis. Birds eat the seeds of Pale Purple Coneflower a few weeks after they bloom. Watch for birds landing on the tops of the cones and pecking away. Lance Leaf Coreopsis is enjoyed by butterflies. It can be a short-lived perennial but it spreads easily by seed.
In late summer, the red Royal Catchfly and white Culver’s Root will bloom together on tall slender stems. The bright red flowers of Royal Catchfly are a favorite nectar source of hummingbirds. Hummingbirds often visit the flowers at similar times each day—maybe in the morning or before dusk. Culver’s Root is popular with many types of bees and soldier beetles which are important pollinators for native plants.
While the summer flowers are blooming, the Little Bluestem grass forms silvery-green mounds. In late summer it will send up columns of silver seed stems.
Yellow Coneflower is an iconic prairie plant with long, dropping flower petals that sway in the wind. The tall pink spikes of Prairie Blazing Star compliment the yellow flowers. Wild Bergamot, or Monarda has a different form than many prairie plants—it spreads by underground rhizomes, like roots, to form a larger patch each year. It’s foliage smells minty. Like most monardas, it often gets mildew on the leaves late in the summer, but it’s nothing to worry about.
At the end of summer the Meadow Blazing Stars will bloom and attract dozens of monarchs every day to drink the nectar (we call it the Monarch Magnet!). It’s truly an amazing sight. The Orange Coneflower blooms at the same time, giving a nice complimentary color to the pink Blazing Stars. It spreads by underground rhizomes each year and forms a nice patch.
The tall airy seed heads of Prairie Dropseed grass are a harbinger of fall. Prairie Dropseed forms graceful mounds of soft leaves before sending up seed stems that smell a bit like cilantro in late summer. It’s the most popular native grass.
Finally, in October, the Grey Goldenrod, New England Aster, and Aromatic Aster start to bloom. Grey Goldenrod is one of the shortest goldenrods and doesn’t spread very much. Aromatic Aster forms a dense mound that spreads by underground rhizomes about 8 inches a year. The light bluish-purple flowers are very important fall nectar and pollen sources for many bees and butterflies when nothing else is blooming. It can survive frosts and we’ve even seen it bloom in Minnesota in November! New England Aster is tall and has purple blooms. It spreads easily by seed, popping up around the garden in new places each year.
In the fall the columns of Little Bluestem turn to a beautiful bronze, standing tall throughout the winter snow.
Maintenance:
Weeding. The first two years are really important, so try to weed every few weeks and pull out even the tiniest weeds each time. If weeds get too big, their big roots pulls up clumps of large clumps of dirt and it wrecks the mulch layer. Watch for weedy grasses that seem to be spreading underground inches or feet at a time—these are particularly difficult weeds to keep under control (all of the grasses or sedges stay in clumps and don’t spread underground).
Watering. If you used 3 inches of wood mulch, you’ll probably only need to water twice a week for a 4-6 weeks after planting and then never again! But always be sure to watch for wilting leaves. Never water every day, and always check the soil moisture under the mulch with your finger before deciding if they need water or not. We have never needed to water a native plant garden after the first year of establishment!
Trimming. At the end of the year you can leave all of the stems over winter. Birds will continue to eat the seeds of Dotted Blazing Star and Narrow Leaf Coneflower into early winter. Bees and insect larvae overwinter in stems. The foliage provides winter interest as it sticks out of the snow. You can also choose to cut things back or mow everything down in fall or spring. Cutting things down allows more sun to reach the ground and plant crowns, warming things up faster in the spring and making things re-sprout earlier.
Mulching. If you use 3 inches of wood mulch to start and make sure you pull weeds when they are very small so their roots don’t wreck the mulch layer when pulled, you shouldn’t have to mulch again—the wood mulch will stay intact as the native plants mature and spread over the years. As the native plants get bigger, especially the grasses and sedges, their leaves will create a natural mulch layer at the end of each season.