Butterfly and Rain Garden

There's this spot near my driveway that floods every year, and it seemed like a great place to think about eliminating the lawn.

So today, between rainstorms, I installed cream wild indigo, two echinacea cultivars, baptisia ‘Twilite Prarieblues', little bluestem 'Sioux Blue', Sullivant's milkweed (also called Prairie milkweed), purple milkweed, Illinois rose, bottle gentian, cup plant, and prairie shooting star. The plants are tiny, and the garden really doesn't look like much yet, but I'm hoping by July it'll be better. The sources for these plants were the Morton Arboretum's members-only plant sale, a nursery in Saint Charles called The Natural Garden, and a mail-order nursery in Wisconsin that specializes in native plants called Prairie Nursery.

The Sullivant's milkweed (asclepias sullivanti), which likes to be wet, went in the low spot that floods every time there's a rainstorm. I'm hoping that I guessed right on my plant requirements and that it'll do well there--but not so well it becomes a nuisance. An internet search tells me that in Wisconsin, Sullivant’s milkweed is a threatened species but that seems not to be the case in Illinois.

Baptisia ‘Twilite Prairieblues’ is a cultivar from the Chicago Botanic Garden—I bought it at the Morton Arboretum plant sale yesterday. It’s supposed to give me blue-purple flowers edged in yellow, though I don’t know if it’ll bloom this year.

I'm hoping these plants will also tolerate errant baskeballs. Yes, that pole in the photo is a driveway b-ball hoop. If not, I guess I'll be putting something else there next spring. The log mysteriously appeared in the garden during the winter. I'm not really sure where it came from, but it has some interesting lichens growing on it.

It's a good thing I was able to plant at all. My order for the space from Prairie Nursery came Friday, and rained for nearly 24 hours straight this weekend. The garden was really soggy, and there's a lot of water on my and my neighbors' lawns. Finally this afternoon, the rain stopped and I gave it a go so the plants wouldn't sit for a week in my cold frame.

I've been reading Design Your Natural Midwest Garden by Pat Hill, and one statistic in it caught my eye. According to the author, there is no water runoff from areas planted with natives, such as a prairie, and water is generally absorbed into the ground. Turf grass (AKA Kentucky bluegrass) is roughly equivalent to asphalt, with about 75% of water lost as runoff. I thought this was particularly interesting, because flooding is a recurrent problem (and was a campaign issue in the recent election) in Elmhurst.