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.

This is the Illinois State Flower?

The first spring I moved into my house, the violets were thing that bloomed most prolifically in my yard. I thought they were cute. In fact, I liked them so much I transplanted them to the garden bed around the foundation of my house.

I paid for that mistake for several years afterwards. Once I found out that most people in the neighborhood consider them to be a weed, I spent several seasons trying to get rid of them.

The violets stayed firmly in the weed category until last Memorial Day weekend, when I went to the Madison, WI farmer’s market and found people selling them—at $5 for 3 plants—on Saturday morning. A sign nearby told browsers that they were the Wisconsin state flower. I wondered if I should reconsider my stance on the violets.

It turns out that they are not just the Wisconsin state flower, but the Illinois state flower as well. A group of school children anointed the violet with this honor over 100 years ago, in 1907. Who knew that was possible for a common lawn weed?

My new book, Swink and Wilhelm’s Plants of the Chicago Region, lists about 2 dozen different species of violet known to grow in the Chicago area. Differentiating them is difficult, and they are apparently known to interbreed. According to Illinois Wildflowers, the common blue violet (Viola sororia) is a native perennial plant. Leaves emerge from rhizomes, that bumpy little cluster I see where the leaves meet the roots when I pull violets out of the ground. The plants like to grow in moist soil and partial shade, and they do very well in my lawn. The flowers and young leaves are apparently edible, though bland, and can be added to salads in small amounts (I’m not sure I want to try this!).

Swink and Wilhelm describe the plant as “weedy” and common in abandoned fields, lawns, and degraded prairies. Judging by how much time I spend hoeing violet seedlings out of my vegetable patch, I’m thinking that description of these little plants is an understatement.

The U of I Cooperative Extension Office has posted an amusing poem about the violet, and it sheds some light on how children may have voted it the state flower. They are, after all, kind of cute, and kids do like to pick them. I haven’t gotten a little bouquet of violets as a gift from the kids yet, but I’d be willing to bet it’s coming.

I'll be pulling the violets this year, because if I let them, they wouldn't make room for anything else.

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.

Buying Shrubs is Easier than Planting Them

I headed out to The Natural Garden, a little early because not many plants were out yet. But early spring is a great time to plant shrubs. I picked up some Illinois wild rose (Rosa setigera), a tall climbing rose with pink flowers, and leadplant (Amorpha canescens), a woody legume that grows 1-3 feet tall.

Normally, I wouldn't drive an hour out of my way for plants, but good-sized native shrubs aren't easy to find. Since I was there, I picked up some Virginia bluebells (Mertensia), in the upper right corner of the photo, and Mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum), the plant on the left, for the shade garden near my kids' Barbie playhouse. The Natural Garden stocks many local ecotypes, but I'm not enough of a purist to forego the convenience of mail order very often.

I got home on Saturday, just before it started raining for 3 days. Today was 60 and sunny, but I still haven't managed to get the shrubs in the ground. I planted the shade perennials on Sunday morning when the rain slowed to a drizzle, but digging large holes for shrubs in the rain didn't sound fun.

The Morton Arboretum's plant sale is this weekend--and that's always very tempting. But I can't buy more plants if I haven't got the ones I already bought in the ground yet. Oh well, guess that means I'm on a deadline now.

Weeds or Chemicals—Not an Easy Choice

I’ve been reading two books about the history and business of the lawn the United States—Ted Steinberg’s American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn and F Herbert Bormann et. al.’s Redesigning the American Lawn. Both books talk about the industrialization of lawn care, starting in the mid 1950’s, as part of the quest for a “perfect” weed-free lawn. The perfect lawn is a common target of native plant enthusiasts, such as Neil Diboll, who gives talks on the “State of the Lawn.”

Reading text about the toxic effects of lawn chemicals left me with a fit of guilt over TrueGreen ChemLawn’s visits to my yard. To their credit, they are very good at controlling the ground ivy and garlic mustard that would otherwise invade my perennial beds, but there’s something about those little “keep off the grass” signs that makes me uneasy.

Lawns have, for a long time, been an important fixture in the American landscape. With the expansion of the suburbs in the 1950’s, a weed-free lawn that blended with the neighbors’ became a mark of good citizenship. According to Ted Steinberg, Abe Levitt told Levittown residents in a weekly newsletter that “A fine carpet of green grass stamps the inhabitants as good neighbors, as desirable citizens.” Today, this is still the case in my neighborhood, and I want to be a good neighbor.

Having a nice lawn was not always a measure of good citizenship; in fact, the lawn as we know it was uncommon until relatively recently. Before the push mower was invented in the mid-1800’s, a lawn was strictly a luxury item and status symbol for private estates, kept short by grazing animals or teams of men wielding scythes. The push mower made the lawn accessible to ordinary homeowners, and a beautification campaign in the first few decades of the 1900’s encouraged people to plant lawns around their homes. In this spirit, the suburb of Riverside, IL, was planned as a community of houses surrounded by lawn.

When Levittown was developed in the 1950’s, lawn was planted as an inexpensive form of landscaping that would make the houses more saleable, and homeowners were required to mow their lawns once a week between April and November. The invention and popularization of the mass-produced, gas-powered mower made this possible.

For lawn care companies, such as Scotts and TrueGreen ChemLawn, the modern ideal of the perfect lawn is good for business. To keep the lawn as a deep green, weed-free carpet of grass, lawn care firms now apply or sell to homeowners pre-emergent herbicides, grub prevention treatments, post-emergent herbicides, and generous quantities of fertilizer (Scotts has recently reduced the amount of phosphorus in its fertilizers). Although the EPA just announced it would require testing of pesticides, it for many decades did not require detailed studies to evaluate the health risks of lawn chemicals. In his book, Steinberg describes the lawn as “like a nationwide chemical experiment with the homeowners as guinea pigs.” Lawn care companies typically say their products are safe when used as directed, or instruct people to read and follow the directions.

The lawn’s origins as a status symbol, its importance in suburban landscaping, and its usefulness as an outdoor play space make complicate the issue of whether or how to maintain one. A conventionally maintained lawn is a major user of water and petroleum, and keeping one weed-free requires more chemicals per acre than are used in agriculture. But doing away with a lawn entirely, or growing a weed-infested lawn, marks one as a “bad citizen” in suburbia.

As an aside, some plants now considered to be weeds, particularly clover, co-evolved with grass (fixing nitrogen for it) and were viewed as desirable in lawns as late as the 1950’s. Scotts at one time sold clover seed to homeowners who wanted it in their lawns.

In the end, I decided to try organic lawn care. On the recommendation of a friend, I called Fertilizer King, a Chicago-area company. They promised applications of slow-release organic fertilizer and weed control for a little less than what we've been paying TrueGreen Chemlawn. I was sold on this, and I’m hoping it’ll be good enough to keep the most troublesome weeds at bay. But I may also have to give up having a lawn that looks like a golf course—which is, but the way, one of the most intensively managed types of lawns, heavily watered and treated with chemicals to keep it looking perfect.

Canceling TrueGreen ChemLawn for the summer was surprisingly easy. The very polite and friendly customer service rep on the other end of the phone said she was sorry to be losing our business, made a note of it in the system, and said we should feel free to call them back if we changed our minds.

I’ll probably miss the golf-course look, but it’ll be nice to do without the keep-off-the-grass signs.