PRAIRIE UP! WITH PLANTSPERSON BENJAMIN VOGT (BEST OF)
- Jennifer Jewell
- Jul 31
- 5 min read
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Ahhh high summer my friends – this week we continue with our CP summer-break reprisals reminding us of the importance of the great outdoors and the care and cultivation of them, revisiting ecological-plantsman Benjamin Vogt’s great work Prairie Up!.....
To inspire your planting and designs for the season ahead, a fierce advocate on behalf of our gardens being critically important links in our world’s broken and fragmented ecological chains.
You may remember my 2018 conversation with Benjamin about his first book –"A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future"? Well that ethical manifesto now has an instruction manual in Benjamin’s second book - "Prairie Up: An Introduction to Natural Garden Design" – it might be just the reference you need to get your fall planting and planning season off to a great start.
HERE IS THIS WEEK'S TRANSCRIPT by Doulos Transcription Service:
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Thinking out loud this week:
Hey, it's Jennifer—
Because we believe that every act of cultivating place with care, which is the best of what Gardening is, is an opportunity to take better care of one another and all the lives of our place, I’d like to see every garden, and every open garden, modeling these same principles and values of the Nibblers – how about you? It is certainly at the heart of what Benjamin Vogt and his Monarch Gardens hold dear….It’s a worthwhile goal for us all!
As you look towards fall planting, let's honor the idea behind Monarch Gardens – and supporting our migrating butterflies in general as they make their ways north in the spring and south again at the end of the season for another winter next year…. The importance of our various native milkweeds – the more than 12 native North American Asclepias species as the only larval food host for the caterpillar (larva) stage of the Monarch butterflies is well researched and promoted in our gardening worlds – especially the importance of locally native, organically grown – not neonicitinoid or otherwise treated seed-grown milkweeds; but adult of course migrating Monarchs – like all butterflies and bees – also need a whole LOT of resting and stormy weather shelter, they need nectar producing flowers to power their journey, and they need dry woody debris as well as shallow water and mud for their puddling mineral-collecting needs.
So as you look at the annual and perennial flowering plants you hope to add or to tend in the coming season – think of not only of the ones you love, but which might also serve to attract and support our butterfly friends.
IN the Xerces Society’s wonderfully helpful guide Gardening for Butterflies, co-authored by Scott Hoffman-Black, Brianna Borders, Candace Fallon, Eric Lee-Mader, and Matthew Shepherd they summarize some good preliminary considerations: “To attract a variety of butterflies and provide the habitats they need to complete their life cycle, an optimal garden design includes regionally appropriate larval host plants, multiple nectar plant species, and sheltered sites that provide safe places to pupate and overwinter. Additionally, good butterfly habitat tends to consist of open, sunny landscapes protected from strong winds. And of course, to sustain both butterflies and other wildlife, these habitats must be free of pesticides. The life cycles of butterflies and moths are intimately connected to the plants that share their home ranges, especially the native plants with which they have coevolved over thousands of years. For a diversity of butterflies, a diversity of plants and flowers is key - from seasonal native wildflowers – trying to include flower choices for spring, for summer, and for fall; grasses, which are fabulous shelter and larval food for many moth and butterfly species; vines, especially native ones including native clematis, native lonicera – or honeysuckle, and aristolochia - or pipevines, are renowned larval and nectar sources, to of course flowering woody shrubs, and trees provide a wealth of essential resources. They go on to stress that: “The native wildflowers of your region (often called forbs by ecologists) are the foundation of every butterfly garden. They can potentially serve as larval hosts, nectar sources, or both.” The authors elaborate on several plant types to keep in mind for full butterfly support and remember that while you might not have every one of these in your small urban or suburban garden, look around at your neighbors and community to see if those spaces might provide what you can’t – like the largest of the trees – oaks and willows among them.
In your sunniest spots – think flowers, flowers, flowers throughout the season – and not one or two, but 3 or 5 or 9 of a kind of flower whose masses become, as Benjamin notes – beacons to migrating butterflies. As Butterfly expert Robert Michael Pyle writes in the foreword to Gardening For Butterflies, “Perhaps you’re beginning with a cottage garden stocked with traditional ornamentals. You’d like to keep your zinnias (great for painted ladies!) but augment them with native plants coevolved with local insects. Or let’s say you have a vegetable plot free of weeds and pests but equally innocent of butterflies, which you miss. Or maybe you share your yard with bluegrass turf and know you could do better. No matter your starting point,” just go ahead and start – I am looking at some new native species of asters rudbeckias, echinaceas, penstemons, mondardellas, alliums, liatris, and thistles – yes thistles! Birds and Butterflies love them – but more on that in another speaking of plants!
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