By Kristine Johnson Imagine a native plant garden. What do you see? Most of us picture colorful and attractive flowers, mostly of a certain shape and a certain height, but growing native plants is so much more than that. This article will encourage you to think a little outside the box to consider different types […] Continue reading "Overlooked Native Plants"
by Karen Vanderwall People living along the Front Range are becoming more aware that conserving water and establishing native habitats is vital to managing our regional drought and supporting local pollinators. The City of Fort Collins is innovating and leading, locally and nationally, by weaving together the built environment and natural ecosystems. Driven by community funding […] Continue reading "The Nature of Fort Collins"
By Deborah Lebow Aal* I bet you’ve made some design mistakes with your native plants. I certainly have. I’ve put a red flower next to another clashing red flower, a tall flower in front of a short, and much worse. So silly. So, I asked a few very active Wild Ones Front Range Chapter folks […] Continue reading "Favorite Native Plant Combinations"
Linum lewisii By Karen Vanderwall With their many electric periwinkle blue flowers, blooming prolifically from late spring through summer, blue flax (Linum lewisii) is a native garden must have. Blue flexor Lewis flax can be described as dainty or airy or even delicate; its stems coming together into a vase shape with spaced small narrow […] Continue reading "Plant Stories: Blue Flax"
By Kristine Johnson I’ve written a series of articles for Wild Ones Front Range on precipitation harvesting, and I’ve recently interviewed Brad Lancaster, Jace Lankow and Luis Salgado–all water harvesting practitioners in Tucson, Arizona–for insights into the connections between native plant gardening and rain gardening. Look for that article in the national Wild Ones Journal […] Continue reading "Connecting Native Plant Gardening and Rain Gardening"
By Kristine Johnson with assistance and photos from Theodore Johnson Mencimer Why Install a Rain Garden Last year, I wrote about the “why” of rainwater harvesting, and Pam Sherman reviewed Brad Lancaster’s well-known books on rainwater harvesting. Brad is very much the “how.” I also mentioned rain gardening in my article on multi-stem trees–which should […] Continue reading "Rain Gardening: Thinking About Next Steps"
By Jonathan Sciarcon* A fellow Wild Ones Front Range Board member asked me to write an article for this month’s newsletter on “damn yellow composites” with the request that I make it funny. While I appreciate her belief that I can write comedically, the truth is that I was not even aware of the term […] Continue reading "Learn to Love Yellow Composites"
By Jan Midgley In dry lands with few woody plants, grasses are the foundation of the landscape both functionally and aesthetically. But why should we include them in public and private designed landscapes? The small, wind-pollinated flowers are not as showy as the flowers of forbs (flowering herbaceous plants that are not a graminoid – […] Continue reading "Grasses are the Foundation"
By Deborah Lebow Aal, with help from Robert Greer, Jan Midgley and Jonathan Sciarcon This is a revised version of our most popular toolkit entry. Gardening in the shade with native plants requires quite a bit of creativity on the Front Range of Colorado. We did not have many native trees here on the plains, […] Continue reading "Colorado Native Plants that Tolerate Shade"
By Paul Alaback and Kristine Johnson Why Use Multi-Stemmed Trees? When we think of creating a native garden or landscape in the semi-arid West, we often conjure up an image of a dry prairie with many wildflowers and grasses, all adapted to hot dry conditions. While some places were historically prairie, all around Colorado we […] Continue reading "Multi-Stem Native Trees and Large Shrubs for Colorado Landscapes"