Rhubarb Even Kids Will Eat

It's farmer's market season, my favorite time of year. I walked down to the one at Prudential Plaza this week, and admired all the flowers, breads, vegetables and herbs. I bought some of the wonderful Misericordia Irish soda bread we love, but I realized as I walked around the stalls that most of the herbs and vegetables were already growing in my backyard. I've been enjoying them for several weeks already.

Besides asparagus, my favorite springtime treat is rhubarb. This is a tough sell for some people. It's not available in the grocery store year-round, only in the spring. Rhubarb is unpalatably sour without sugar, and must be cooked before being eaten. It looks strange, like pink celery, and not everyone knows what to do with it.

With the rhubarb in my yard, I've been making strawberry-rhubarb muffins, an adaptation of a Cooks.com recipe. The first time I made these, my daughter begged me to cook them again. Because I'm a calorie counter, I substitute applesauce for the oil, and it works just fine. To compensate for the added sweetness, I reduce the sugar and add a little more oil.

What's Blooming Now: Prairie Shooting Star

I put these little native wildflowers in my garden for the first time last year, and I loved them so much I had to add more. They aren't big plants, perhaps 8-10 inches across and 18 inches tall when in bloom. The leaves form small rosettes similar to a primrose, which is not surprising since the plant is a member of this family.

Last spring when they bloomed, I caught bees climbing into the flowers from underneath. They emerged dizzy, apparently sated, and covered with pollen.

The flowers of the shooting star (dodecatheon meadia) are white to a light shade of pink or purple. The ones in my garden, shown in the photo, change color as the blossoms age. As you can see, the flowers hang upside-down on the stalk. Prairie shooting star grows well in full sun to part shade and has, according to Illinois Wildflowers, been found in most counties in Illinois. The plants do go dormant during the hot summer months.

My library copy of the Tallgrass Restoration Handbook classifies them as "conservative wildflowers," which means they do not typically occur outside of the highest-quality prairie remnants or restorations. So far, however, they are doing well in my garden.

Lurie Garden—April 2009

About 10 days ago, on one of those warm early-spring days, I hoofed it down to the Lurie Garden to have a look at what was going on. Yes, I meant to post this much sooner, but I've been awfully busy working in my own yard lately. I spent the weekend mulching garden beds, picking asparagus, watching kids play in the backyard, and tying grapevines to a trellis, not in front of the computer.

What’s really interesting about visiting the garden before all the perennials have really leafed out is that you can see the structure of the plantings. It’s much easier to see how the plants are arranged before the leaves and flowers hide the clumps, or root crowns, in the ground. Once everything gets going, it’s nearly impossible to tell where one plant begins and another ends.

Inside the tall evergreen hedges that shield the garden from the rest of the park, Gustafson Guthrie Nichol Ltd, Piet Oudolf and Robert Israel (the garden’s designers) arrange the plants in large, naturalistic groupings. Plants are spaced much more closely than is usual in the typical suburban yard. The distance between the centers of most perennial clumps is not more than 2 feet, and often quite a bit less than that. The designers aren't interested in showing off discrete clumps or individual plants, as is common in the suburbs.

It turns out that dense plantings provide much more cover for wildlife than discrete clumps separated by neat stretches of woodchips. Consequently, Douglas Tallamy, in his book, Bringing Nature Home, recommends such denser plantings. My experience has been that dense plantings are also easier to maintain--the perennials tend to crowd out the weeds when densely planted.

A stream-like water feature and paved path divides the Lurie Garden into two sections, the “Light Plate,” with mostly colorful plants and wildflowers, and the “Dark Plate,” in which grasses and plants with more subtle coloring predominate.

On that warm day in April, prairie smoke (Geum triflorum), grape hyacinths, blue anenomes, and daffodils were in bloom. Rather than planting little clumps of each here and there, the garden’s designers placed these plants in large, naturalistic groupings that covered good-sized areas. The garden designers used flower colors on opposite sides of the color wheel, in yellow and blue, also called complementary colors.

Although the garden is in the middle of downtown Chicago, I did spot some wildlife, such as the robin shown in the top photo. He was hopping around in the grape hyacinths.

One of my new favorite spring-blooming perennials in the garden is the prairie smoke (bottom photo). These small plants have pink flowers that produce wispy puffs of seeds later in the spring. They require hot, dry soil, and lots of sun. I managed to start some of these plants from seed last spring, with mixed results--it remains to be seen whether my prairie smoke seedlings will thrive or fail.