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July 1999
Native Wildflowers Offer Variety to Gardeners
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Each summer, armies of mowers move across the land to manicure large expanses of turfgrass.
What a waste of time, money and opportunity, says Michael Dana, Purdue University professor of horticulture.
He advocates growing native wildflowers instead.
He says wildflowers, which include native prairie grasses and broadleaf flowers, offer many advantages, including environmental ones, over large expanses of trimmed turf.
"For people who like a highly controlled landscape with, for example, Japanese yews clipped and sheared, this has little appeal," Dana says. "But a fundamental environmental ethic is embodied in planting native species. I view it as an underutilized plant group. From the environmental diversity aspect alone, native wildflowers are worth including in our landscaping options."
Native plantings work well in large, full-sun areas, such as those found on industrial sites and golf courses, in highway medians, and in some farm areas. Native grasses are even acceptable on some Conservation Reserve Program lands, except lands that are in danger of erosion or those that are forested.
Dana says that native wildflower plantings have a mixture of forbs, which are wild flowering herbs, and flowering prairie grasses.
Among the forbs that Dana recommends are gray-headed coneflower, bee balm, prairie phlox, tall tickseed, Culver's root, obedient plant, butterfly weed, compassplant, prairie dock, pale purple coneflower and prairie blazing star.
Recommended grasses include big bluestem, indiangrass, side-oats grama, little bluestem and switchgrass. Dana has compiled a list of sources for seeds and plants and posted it on the Web at http://www.hort.purdue.edu/ext/sources_IN_wildflowers.html.
"I'm not a 'natives are always better' advocate," Dana says. "In fact, when we talk about urban landscapes, native plants can be poorer landscape performers than non-native species. But in the proper setting, native grasses and wildflowers do very well. A wildflower planting has several advantages over just mowing these areas. Doing that is just a large expense, and boring, too."
According to Dana, wildflower areas offer these advantages:
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