This week our gardening expert is prairie-inspired!
WORDS: SUSIE WHITE; WWW.SUSIE-WHITE.CO.UK @COTTAGEGARDENER PHOTOGRAPHS: SUSIE WHITE, JASON INGRAM, SHUTTERSTOCK
Prairie planting is a naturalistic style inspired by the grasslands of North America, and it is perfect for creating wildlife gardens.
It’s a versatile look that fits both a contemporary scheme and a traditional cottage garden. With its mixture of grasses and perennials, it has softness and movement, colour and texture, and it’s the style I’ve used for some of my borders.
You need to prepare the ground well, making it completely weed free. Once the plants have grown up it’s quite difficult to move amongst them. I find a mulch really useful and it means that, after a spring weeding, I can virtually leave the border alone to do its own thing.
Start by planting a matrix of grasses randomly across the area, repeating them in large clumps. These form the backbone of prairie planting, and create sound as the wind rustles through them. They turn a lovely biscuit colour in autumn, lasting right the way through the winter before being cut back in February.
One of the most popular grasses is Stipa gigantea, known as golden oats. This creates a mound of fine blue-green leaves out of which rise arching stalks topped in trembling golden flowers, which are beautiful with the sun behind them.
Finches and sparrows come to feed on the grass seedheads which are beautiful outlined in frost. In February I cut out the stalks wearing protective glasses but I comb through the basal mound of leaves using a rake.
There’s a huge range of different sized grasses so you can vary the heights in the border for a natural effect.
North American plants such as asters, rudbeckias, echinacea, globe thistle and heleniums combine beautifully, and you can dot around bulbs such as tulips, camassias and asphodel.
Prairie gardens are at their best from midsummer onwards so you can add flowers for earlier in the season: day lilies, Siberian irises or Shasta daisies.
Late summer sees the white starry flowers of wild carrot and the vibrant purple of verbena. Persicaria ‘Firetail’ makes strong growing clumps and I use its deep red spires as cut flowers.
I love the swaying wands of purple loosestrife, a native wildflower rich in nectar
