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When Linda McHenry strolls into her little patch of prairie, it’s as if the 50-something woman has turned 7 again.
“I want you to see Bertha,” she says, leading a visitor to a spot among the blooming goldenrod and tattered Queen Anne’s lace where a fat, black-and-yellow garden spider is busily spinning a deadly shroud of silk around a hapless grasshopper.
“She’ll have him wrapped up in no time,” she says, spritzing the spider’s web with water from a plastic water bottle she carries to freshen blossoms for butterflies.
“Sometimes I do that just so I can see it better,” she says of the web. “Isn’t that amazing? Look at it – the symmetry of it! Amazing.”
McHenry, 59, is the kind of gardener who likes Mother Nature to be, well, unfooled around with. Sure, she’s got her tidy patches of impatiens and sedum up by the house; but she’d just as soon spend her time sitting on the rough-hewn wooden bench in the middle of the quarter-acre of yard that she has gradually been turning into what it used to be.
Yes, for the past seven years, McHenry has had a prairie companion at her home outside Bluffton. And she couldn’t be happier.
“My whole yard would be one if I could do it,” she says.
Unlike some homeowners who hire professional prairie restoration landscapers to achieve the natural look, McHenry built her prairie from scratch.
“It isn’t a work of come-what-may gardening,” she says. “It has been an arduous culmination of research, propagation and planning.”
But it’s an effort that now yields McHenry two bloom seasons a year, one in June and July and one in September and October, that she calls “just fabulous.”
“It’s beautiful. It’s a sea of color out there,” she says.
The first step to McHenry’s prairie came one fall when she killed the grass in the lawn next to a neighbor’s cornfield.
Then, she planted some prairie grass seed she procured from one of her sons, Rob, 38, who has a degree in wildlife management and forestry. He manages a prairie in a North Carolina nature preserve.
She and her husband, Robert, are parents of three sons and a daughter, all grown.
“I told him I wanted to do something different out here, and he got me started,” she says. “He’s been very encouraging.”
Then began the painful lessons in the pitfalls of prairie planting.
“What I didn’t know when I started is it takes three years to mature,” McHenry says. “The first year the grass was only 4 inches tall. It was kind of disappointing. The second year, you have grasses, but no seeding. The third year, they finally started seeding themselves.”
Then came the second lesson.
Weeds. Lots of them.
Although McHenry is empathetic toward a lot of plants others might consider weeds – she welcomes wild asters, blue-flowered chickory and even burr-adorned teasel – there are some she couldn’t let have their way.
“Everything came up,” she says of the years when she was establishing the prairie. “I weeded by hand. The thing I pulled out the most was (Canadian) thistle. I guess I pulled a thousand of them. And then of course you never get all the root, and they just come up again.”
But with diligence, the thistle siege abated over the years and now, when some arrive, she tends to leave them alone until they bloom. After all, their fuzzy purple puffs of flowers are kind of pretty.
“Then I lop the tops off before they go to seed so they don’t blow everywhere,” she says triumphantly.
McHenry says the next lesson is one she is still learning: Not all prairie plants are created equal.
Because many grow in areas with sandier and dryer soil, not all are suited for the heavy clay found in Wells County and elsewhere in northeast Indiana.
McHenry says she’s had generally good results with plants from Prairie Nursery ( www.prairienursery.com), a Westfield, Wis.-based grower of native plants. In its catalog, the company categorizes its merchandise not only according to zones and light conditions, but also by soil type.
It also has a special collection of “clay busters,” plants able to grow in soil that turns “from gumbo soup in spring to a brick factory in summer,” as the catalog puts it.
McHenry says she has bought blue false indigo, with its clusters of blue flowers in late spring, and summer-blooming wild senna. They grew.
But she didn’t have good luck with a showy orange butterfly weed, a variant of Asclepias tuberosa she tried that is even recommended for clay soil.
“I really don’t know what happened with that,” she says.
But she has found ironweed, which produces clusters of magenta flowers in late summer, grows well and serves the same flutterer-flattering purpose.
A type of daisy that has flowers that look like miniature sunflowers also has been a pleasant surprise. It towers over the rest of her plantings at more than 10 feet tall in the back of the prairie.
McHenry obtained seeds from her son for gamma grass (also known as buffalo grass), which produces a large clump of tall, tan grass from seeds nearly the size of a popcorn kernel. He also sent her bluestem grass, switchgrass and Indian grass. All have become firmly established.
Now, McHenry says, the prairie has become a low-maintenance natural haven.
All she does, she says, is occasional weeding – “It’s tedious work, but I don’t mind it. I enjoy it,” she says. And she regularly cuts back her paths because they tend to get overgrown.
“I keep everything natural. I don’t spray. I don’t water it. I don’t fertilize it,” she says.
“In the fall, I get the lawnmower and plow it down, until I have absolutely nothing left, and then in the spring it starts all over again.”
She’s no longer actively expanding the prairie’s area, although she can’t promise she won’t try out a new species or two.
And despite the colors and blooms, it’s the prairie’s wildlife that most enthralls McHenry – and makes her wish more people would try planting prairies.
“I have a lot of birds out here,” she says, noting she has seen cardinals, blue jays, mockingbirds, chickadees, goldfinches, red-winged blackbirds, bluebirds, kestrels and the occasional hawk making use of the vegetation.
Rabbits? She’s got them. Butterflies – she has them too, even kinds she can’t name.
Bees? “Right now, everyone is so concerned about bees, that they’re dying off. Well, I’ve got ’em. I don’t know how many species of wasps and bees I’ve seen,” she says.
“The insect life is fantastic out there,” McHenry adds, saying Bertha has plenty of neighborhood beetles, grasshoppers and praying mantises to lure.
“I think they’re all fascinating,” McHenry says of her prairie bugs. “Every single one of them.”
rsalter@jg.net
