Fall in the Prairie Bed

Fall is an under-rated perk of a garden. Sure, the blossoms get all of the hype and attention, the imagery of supple youth and untapped virility. Summer gets the glory of bold colors and the steady buzz of the industrious insects. But something different happens in fall.

Labor Day has come and gone. The garden shops are full of pansies and mums offering one last chance to blast oranges, yellows, purples, blues, and deep reds. It you're lucky the snowfall of sweet fall clematis is somewhere in your sight line, and the curious peaks of fall crocuses are staking out their spots among the the falling leaves. But you needn't rush out to find new beauty to add to your garden. It may already be there.

Four years ago, when we moved into our home, the south side of our land, all along our foundation line was desolate. Hordes of feral cats had worked at turning the sun-baked earth to dust. Then, they'd turned the dust to their own latrine. Transforming that area into something different was a priority. Knowing that it received full sun and was a little dry, we wanted to make it a prairie bed, filled with coneflowers, black-eyed susans, a few grasses, and milkweeds. I hauled off about 500 lbs of dirt, and amended the remaining soil with compost, peat, and mulch. The following spring, planting began. Four years later life has returned.

It's too easy to let death pervade thoughs of the fall garden. The pollinators are mostly gone now from my prairie bed. A few black-eyed susans cling to their blossoms, which are wilted and faded. But mostly now, the tone has shifted to the minimalist clarity of seed pods. The coneflowers are like porcupines spiked atop skewers, the grasses are heavy with grain, the milkweeds are topped with seed filled pods that will soon explode releasing marshmallow parachutes to the wind.

This isn't death. It's nature's brilliant pragmatism, stripping away the superfluous, so that the next generation can thrive. Visiting chickadees and goldfinches don't find their coneflower-seed-dinners masked like hot dogs wrapped in parchment. It's bold, edgy, presented on a stick, stable enough for a casual sit down meal, but sensible enough for quick snack on the go! The milkweed parachutes don't need to fear becoming entangled in the twisting tentacles of the nearby native liatris. Their pods will open like a Lunar Landers, giving them a platform from which to launch themselves across my neighborhood. It's a strategy of aggressive native re-introduction, and it has worked. Milkweed now grows in every one of my flower beds, from sun to shade, and from wet to dry.

There are gardeners who see the fall as a time of slashing and mulching, digging for new bulbs, and wrapping delicate exotics in organic sweaters to protect them from the harsh months to come. But in my prairie bed, the party rocks on. It's autumn. Dessert is being served. This bed ain't ready for bedtime quite yet.