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What Would Change Your Mind About Using Native Plants in Your Landscape?
Would you choose a garden that takes less of your time to maintain? Or a sustainable, environmentally, eco-friendly, pollinator friendly garden that heightens the senses? Do you want masses and drifts...
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Is Your Native Plant Garden For the Birds?
This winter, I have been designing a landscape using native plants for the Northern Flint Hills Audubon Society in Manhattan. This design has been a great experience as I have evaluated the site and...
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Five Benefits of Native Plants
The prairies of the Great Plains are diverse and complex. They are often overlooked and taken for granted. They are subtle in beauty, but resilient. Because of the many benefits the prairie provides...
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Vines: Taking Your Landscape to a New Level
Vines are underutilized in nearly every garden, in my opinion, including here at the arboretum. It may be that we don’t have the structures to support them and show off their attributes, or we are...
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A Garden-Worthy Perennial: Threadleaf Bluestar
Amsonia hubrichtii, the threadleaf bluestar, is one of my favorite plants. It was not well known among gardeners until the Perennial Plant Association named it the 2011 Plant of the Year. The species...
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Seven Steps to Planning Your Native Landscape
Interest in native landscaping is growing in popularity. This time of year leading up to our spring plant sale, homeowners and businesses contemplate what they would like their landscape to look like....
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Scott’s Top Ten Sun-Loving Plants for Spring 2015
One of the themes this spring for planting is diversity. By planting a diversity of wildflowers and grasses in your garden, you will attract many different forms of wildlife, including pollinators and...
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Native Plant Alternatives for Three Common Non-Natives
One of the great things about native plants is that there is so much diversity found in the prairie. From wet to dry, sun to shade, clay to sand, there is a plant for every place in the landscape....
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Three Native Sedges Made for the Shade
One of the toughest areas to grow plants is in dry shade. There is a smaller plant palette that grows in these harsh conditions compared to more sunny locations in your yard. Root competition really...
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Some Prairie Garden Favorites
Late summer to early fall is the best time to establish perennial wildflowers, grasses, and shrubs. With cooler, wetter fall and spring seasons to begin to establish deep, long-lived root systems,...
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Asters: Autumn’s Crescendo
Mention fall blooms to most gardeners and they think of chrysanthemums. Blooming in September and October, “mums” are the major source of color in most late-season gardens. Another group of...
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Four Ways to Highlight Elements of Your Natural Landscape.
Many people come to the Luminary Walk each year and enjoy the prairie landscape illuminated by Christmas lights. It is amazing how a few lights can make the natural landscape come to life at night....
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Five Ways Native Plants Enrich the Environment
One of the traits of being a horticulturist is a heightened awareness of plants. The good, the bad, the ugly, the sad, and the beautiful are all critiqued. My family is used to it, but they still...
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Spring Flowering Native Plants
I love changes in the seasons. The dawn of spring, however – giving forth increased warmth, a variety of distinctive earthy to sweet smells, green and colorful sights, and sounds from many species of...
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Principles of a Sustainable Landscape Design
Through our work in promoting the use of native plants in landscaping, we have observed that homeowners and gardeners are becoming increasingly aware of the positive impacts they can have on the...
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Native Plant Combinations for the Landscape
Many people who visit our FloraKansas Plant Sale are very interested in converting their gardens to using native plants, but they often are unsure of which plants to put together and in what...
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Landscaping with Native Plants – One Small Step at a Time
I am an enthusiastic advocate for landscaping with native plants. I preach this message at our spring and fall plant sales, talk about it in presentations, plan and promote lectures and symposia around...
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Native Plant Selection Made Easy
I have found that a beautiful native landscape doesn’t magically appear. It starts with a plan. By choosing the right plants that grow well together in your setting, you will avoid many of the...
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Celebrating Silphiums
Late July to early August is a great time of the year to be celebrating Silphiums. Scott wrote a Silphium post last summer highlighting the four species we can grow well in south central Kansas. I...
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Six Elements of a Beautiful Fall Garden
I have said it before that fall is my favorite time of the year. It means that the hottest days of summer will be replaced by autumn’s cool mornings and warm afternoons. The landscape is transformed...
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