Short and Sunny Garden Design
Garden at a glance:
Sun-loving plants (see list below)
Only short plants for front yards and boulevards
Perfect pollinator garden for beginners
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
Plant the shortest flowers near the borders—Prairie Smoke, Pussytoes, Harebell, Shooting Star, and Nodding Onion
Plant the medium-height plants in the middle or back of the garden—Orange Coneflower, Blanket Flower, Aromatic Aster, and Lead Plant
Most plants can be planted 12-15 inches apart, but the Orange Coneflower and Aromatic Aster spread underground so plant them 18-24 inches away from other plants.
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
6 Nodding Onion (Allium cernuum)
1 Lead Plant (Amorpha canescens)
3 Prairie Pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta)
3 Butterfly Milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa)
1 Aromatic Aster (Aster oblongifolius)
1 Cream Wild Indigo (Baptisia bracteata)
3 Harebell (Campanula rotundifolia)
3 Purple Prairie Clover (Dalea purpurea)
3 Shooting Star (Dodecatheon meadia)
3 Narrow-leaved Coneflower (Echinacea angustifolia)
3 Prairie Smoke (Geum triflorum)
3 Dotted Blazing Star (Liatris punctata)
3 Pale Spiked Lobelia (Lobelia spicata)
3 Bradbury's Monarda (Monarda bradburiana)
3 Prairie Phlox (Phlox pilosa)
3 Orange Coneflower (Rudbeckia fulgida)
Grasses and Sedges
15 Blue Grama Grass (Bouteloua gracilis)
6 Star Sedge (Carex radiata)
6 Parasol Sedge (Carex umbellata)
What to expect (A Garden Journal):
This garden is one of our favorite pollinator gardens. All of the plants are short enough that it’s a welcome addition in front yards, near porches, or by sidewalks.
In April, the Prairie Smoke will start blooming with its nodding red flowers. If you’re lucky, you’ll see a bumblebee attach itself upside-down and buzz its wings to shake the pollen out. After blooming the flowers point upwards and the seed heads look like puffs of smoke. The Pussytoes will start spreading in spring by runners that sprawl slowly across the ground. It is a host plant for American painted lady butterflies, so by mid-summer you will start seeing little web-like “nests” that the black spiky caterpillars make while they eat the leaves.
In May the Shooting Star flowers will shoot out of the ground quickly and bloom. They are spring ephemerals, which means that after they bloom they go dormant for the rest of the year. The Bradbury’s Monarda will form a short mound of beautiful purple and dark green leaves which smell like mint. It spreads slowly by underground rhizomes, or roots, after a few years. Bumblebees enjoy the pink spotted flowers.
The sedges 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. Star Sedge and Parasol Sedge stay in short clumps and form seed heads in early summer.
The sprouts of Cream 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. When it blooms it looks like a wedding bouquet! 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.
June and July provides bursts of color throughout the garden. One of our favorite color combinations is the pink Prairie Phlox next to the blue Harebells and the orange Butterfly Milkweed. Prairie Phlox flowers are popular with small skipper butterflies. The tiny seed pods pop when they ripen, and if you stand next to them on a warm sunny day you can hear them crackling! Butterfly Milkweed is a host plant for monarch butterflies. If you notice a monarch in your garden, watch if they land upside-down on a milkweed leaf to lay a single tiny white egg.
Lead Plant is an interesting flower with purple and orange flower spikes. If you don’t cut the stems at the end of the year, they’ll sprout new leaves on the stems just like a shrub. The taproots grow extremely deep—as far as 15ft deep! Narrow Leaf Coneflower blooms at the same time, providing classic pink flower petals but with much less aggressive seeding than some of the other coneflowers.
Purple Prairie Clover stays in a clump and has puffs of bright pink flowers. It’s very popular with all kinds of bees. It spreads by seed after a few years. Blooming at the same time is Pale Spiked Lobelia. The white flower spikes look great with the pinks and oranges of the other summer flowers.
At the end of summer the Orange Coneflower and Nodding Onion start to bloom. Orange Coneflower is also known as black eyed susan and is a popular garden plant. It spreads by underground rhizomes each year and forms a nice patch. Nodding Onion has pink flowers which are loved by bees. It does have edible onion bulbs but they aren’t very flavorful and too much can cause stomach aches! It spreads easily by seed and the new seedlings look like little grass sprouts.
At the beginning of fall you’ll see the pink flower spikes of Dotted Blazing Star next to the tan seed heads of Blue Grama Grass. Dotted Blazing Star, also known as liatris, forms nice compact mounds after a few years. Blue Grama Grass is one of our favorite grasses because it stays in a clump and is very short, making it a great companion for short prairie flowers.
Finally, in October, the Aromatic Aster starts to bloom. It forms a dense mound that spreads by underground rhizomes about 8 inches a year, so keep it spread out from other plants in the beginning. 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!
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.