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The meadow garden: where change takes center stage

A meadow garden inverts our common sense of gardening. Instead of cleaning up and simplifying an area, the meadow garden deliberately mimics nature. Instead of arranging plants in grids and rows, the meadow lets them escape and spread. The meadow garden focuses on texture and movement, and is encouraged to change throughout the seasons or the years.

A typical yard has rows or patches of flowers and shrubs around its centerpiece, the lawn. In the meadow garden, it’s the walkways and hardscape that provide structure—as a winding path of cobblestones, a rectangular strip of crushed granite, or a patio. The designer is invited to envision, first, the most appealing way to move through the space. You think about where you’d like to stop or sit, where you’d like to create a focal point, where you want to place a birdhouse or some boulders. The plants cover the remaining area—they are the negative space. In that sense, instead of focusing on the appearance of a garden, a meadow garden focuses on how you will spend time there.

Of course a meadow garden offers many practical rewards as well. Once established it’s very low-maintenance—spreading, rhizomatous or reseeding plants crowd out weeds. Dead stems and flowers provide interesting shapes through the winter so you don’t need to constantly cut things back. The garden provides food for birds and wildlife, hosts a variety of native plants, can be made to require less irrigation, and mulches itself with its falling leaves and stems, gradually improving soil. That might be why this is an increasingly popular garden style for both high-budget public gardens and cost-conscious home gardeners alike.

What is a meadow garden?

Although there is no explicit definition of a meadow garden, meadow gardens typically have the following attributes:

Usually covers a larger area than a border garden
Grows in full sun to part sun
Can be installed with small plants (plugs) and seed, saving costs
Makes use of natural rainfall with low to moderate supplemental water
Emphasizes grasses, artemisias and textural plants rather than blooming flowers alone
Is structured around grassland perennials, plus some annuals that self-seed on their own
Tolerates dead flowers, cones and seed pods for visual interests rather than clearing them immediately—a true four-seasons garden
Includes plants that are native to the region
Considers the plants’ usefulness to birds, wildlife and pollinators
Incorporates spreading plants that spread into each other rather than leaving gaps

Creating a meadow garden

Since meadow gardens tend to cover a large area, there are both benefits and challenges. One benefit is that it is more affordable to fill a large space with rapidly-spreading perennials than to do so with slow-growing specimen plants. On the other hand, meadow gardens defy the familiar residential yard structure and require well-placed paths and boundaries to contrast the chaotic nature of the planting beds. Figuring out how to design them well and prepare such a large space for planting can be intimidating.

Planning/designing the garden

Start planning a meadow garden by identifying inhabitable spaces within the garden’s boundaries. If you’d like to include a sitting area, water feature, designated spot for bird feeders, a gazebo or deck, designate those spaces first. Your vision for large shrubs and trees should also come before garden beds. Plant structure and growth in full shade are vastly different and fall under the category of a woodland garden rather than meadow.

First step: The borders of the meadow garden are ascertained (in this case the whole yard) and the flagstone patio, seating and fire pit are planned. A winding path is drawn. Solid dark dots represent sprinkler heads in a sprinkler irrigation system.

After you’ve identified your garden’s access points, such as patios or benches, sketch out the walkways between them. Paths can curve, cross or meander, depending on your preference. Straight, square-edged concrete walkways can make an attractive contrast against the billowing drifts of plants, but a crushed stone path that follows a winding arc with flowers and grass spilling over the edge can be beautiful too. It’s also wise to create some narrower, lower-order walkways to divide up large planting beds, for both aesthetic and practical reasons. The secondary paths help you move through the garden without trampling plants, and allow you to enjoy them from different vantage points.

Then, it’s time to figure out the plan for plants. Start by plotting zones for tall, medium and short plants. Site taller plants in the center of planting beds, away from walkways, while shorter plants will line the walkways. Be mindful of views you want to preserve or eyesores you want to screen from various vantage points. Also be mindful of sprinklers: if you have an automatic irrigation system, avoid blocking spray nozzles with tall plants.

Think of flower colors and textures you want to design with. I think it’s best to pick two to three core flower colors per blooming season in a section of the garden and select plants that blooming with various shades of those colors. A few off-theme accent plants can be OK, but sticking to a core color palette will create a much more harmonious and professional look. Arrange large swaths or drifts of many plants of the same species, scaled to the overall garden size. (Enormous gardens may have swaths of tens to hundreds of plants of the same species together, while smallish gardens might only have room for clusters of 2-3 plants). Try to put contrasting textures near each other: grasses next to broad-leafed plants and flowers, plants with sprays of small flowers near plants with large flowers, and plants with silver or purplish leaves beside plants with unremarkable green foliage, and so forth. Consider repeating patterns, with the same species appearing in drifts or clusters in multiple places in the garden rather than a single section for each type of plant.

Clearing the space

What’s the best way to eradicate weeds or lawns to begin planting a garden? Do you need herbicide? Do you need to solarize?Should you till everything up to prepare the soil? I find that less intervention is often quicker and more reasonable: simply covering lawns and weedy areas with a 1/2 to 1-inch layer of compost and then few more inches of cheap, bulk wood chip mulch can smother the grass and create a fertile expanse for a meadow garden to go in.

This meadow garden is being installed in Westminster, Colorado by expanding existing garden beds over a lawn area. I spread a crushed rock path and thin compost layer directly over turf, which, in addition to a 3 inch mulch layer, is sufficient to block sunlight and kill the lawn and weeds. It is immediately ready for plants, as long as grass is removed directly under the plant since the mulch will be parted there. Spring 2020.

If mulching is generally good for gardens, why does covering a lawn or weeds with soil and wood chips kill it?

Simply covering unwanted plants with wood chip mulch can be a surprisingly effective way to weaken and kill them. (Woody shrubs, bindweed, quackgrass, Canada thistle and invasive groundcovers like vinca may be an exception.) Don’t chop the stems off, simply trample them down and cover. Although dormant plants can push spring shoots through mulch and soil to reach sunlight, unwanted plants buried intact during their vegetative phase are often unable to do this. Generating new shoots is a hormonally-driven process in plants—it occurs when there is a loss or absence of existing stems and foliage. Since the weeds and lawn grass still has its vegetation under the mulch—making hormones that signal that the plant still has stems and doesn’t need to create new shoots—weeds wait for daylight that doesn’t come, and exhaust stored energy trying to grow more leaves under the covering.

In most cases, some bits of growth will manage to reach the surface, but they will be weakened, easy to pluck or cover again to deplete them further. Desired plants, on the other hand, have been taking advantage of the fertile season and are prepared to shade and out-compete residual weeds. Occasional light weeding, when vigorous garden plants are becoming established, is enough to tip the balance of power away from weeds and eradicate the majority of them.

In this image I started the process of planting the meadow garden while the lawn was still being covered in compost and mulch. I sacrificed a single, mature Salvia pratensis plant by bare-rooting it and stripping the fibrous main stem into 26 divisions, each with some top growth and connected roots. They were planted directly into the ground under the compost on both sides of the path. 25 of the 26 survived. Spring 2020.

Trails and paths made of crushed stone or sand and flagstone can go right over the weeds and turf as well. (For flagstone or flat pavers, it is better to mow the weeds close to the ground so that the stones don’t shift as the smothered plants decay.)

Just be sure to plant new plants directly in the native soil rather than the pure compost, which will burn tender roots. After a season or two, the compost will break down and merge with the underlying soil.

In this alternate view of the same Westminster, Colorado garden, the lawn is immediately transformed into a clean slate for planting with a top-dressing of compost and mulch. Some of the larger plants had already been growing in the previous garden bed and kept in the new plan. But if you look closely you can see dozens of perennial divisions planted in the area, at very low cost because they were propagated from a handful of fast-growing perennial plants. Spring 2020.

A note on tilling

Tilling is a popular way to clear a garden plot for planting and many guides recommend it as a way to clear beds and “soften” soil for roots. I dispute that. The most aggressive resprouting weeds will return from roots. Soil with existing grass, weeds or other plants is going to be full of beneficial channels where roots have grown and died, worms and burrowing insects have cleared tunnels, and microscopic fungi have built soft fibrous bands of tissue to move water and nutrients around. The existing porosity will allow water to quickly soak into the soil, and new plants’ roots will follow the channels left by old roots to grow deeper more quickly than in compacted soil.

Tilling tends to collapse the soil’s structure. When tilled soil gets wetted again, it becomes muddy and dense. Beyond that, tilling is extra work!

When I plant a small plant or plug, I’ll break up the soil a few inches around the planting hole to remove existing weed roots and make sure soil fines are able to dissolve and settle around the new plant’s roots, but I do not till a broad area. Similarly, when planting seeds, I disrupt the top inch or so of soil to clear competing plants, but don’t go any deeper than that.

This garden is in a residential front yard in Broomfield, Colorado. The homeowner seeded part of the yard with a wildflower and drought-tolerant grass seed mix a few months before I came in to install a more formal meadow garden. After laying crushed stone paths, I began adding yarrow, sedum and lamb’s ear by breaking up the soil in a 12-inch-diameter patch around each new plant so it can establish without competition, and then covered the root zone with mulch. However, some of the grass and flowers can be allowed remain in the gaps to add to this garden.

Planting the garden

A garden doesn’t need to be complete all at once—they take time to mature, and you may be discovering new types of plants you’d like to add in for years to come. But the first plants to install are your big, fast-growing, spreading and reseeding plants, because they will help fill the space, out-compete new or remaining weeds that sprout and give you an immediate reward. You might also be comfortable with letting an aggressive plant, such as lamb’s ear, yarrow or milkweed, spread widely at first, and eventually clear patches of it add new types of plants.

Back in the Westminster garden, young plants are quickly getting established a few months after the original bed was expanded.

Using the same process I used to divide a single Salvia plant into many new plants, I added many other drifts of small plants by splitting up larger plants that had been planted in a nearby garden 1 year earlier. That included fernleaf yarrow (one plant made 15), Stella d’Oro daylilly (one clump made dozens of small clusters around the path edges), lamb’s ear (one clump made a dozen), Rocky Mountain Penstemon (one plant made 15), variegated maidenhair grass (a portion of an old clump made 7), indiangrass (1 clump made 5), little bluestem grass (1 clump made 5), Artemesia ludoviciana (as basal stem cuttings from several plants) and bearded iris (several nearby clusters were divided). There are also 5 nursery-purchased butterfly weed plants, 1 nursery-purchased false indigo, and 3 nursery-purchased anise hyssop. The pink daylilies, Russian sage and foxtail lily seen here going to seed were already established here.

Because of the cost-savings of using very small divisions of fast-growing plants, the total installation costs included less than $200 of raw materials and new plants. Although existing plants to propagate aren’t often available, the small starts can be seen as the equivalent of using very small plants or plugs from a nursery. Summer 2020.

Fast-growing, tall/large meadow garden plants include:

Large ornamental bunchgrasses such as maiden hair grass (Miscanthus), indiangrass (Sorghastrum nutans), big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii), switchgrass (panicum), feather reed grass (Calamagrostis varieties), giant sacaton (Sporobolus wrightii), pink hair grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris) and ravennagrass (Saccharum ravennae). Some of these get very large so be sure to read the description.
Fernleaf yarrow (Achillea filipendulina)
Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia)
Maximillian’s sunflower (Helianthus maximilanii)
Artemisia ‘Powis Castle’ (Artemisia hybrid)
Showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa)
Goldenrod (Solidago)
Joe Pye weed (Eutrochium purpureum)
False indigo (Baptisia australis)

Additionally, a meadow garden needs variations in height with many shorter species as well. Often, the best medium-sized perennials are those that will spread, multiply and/or reseed.

Second-order plants to quickly fill a meadow garden:

Medium-sized ornamental grasses including fountaingrass (Pennesitum), little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), blue grama grass ‘Blonde Ambition’ (Bouteloua gracillis), as well as spreading or running grasses such as blue lyme grass (Leymus arenarius) or ribbon grass (Phelarus arundinacea). Be cautious with the spreading grasses, some may overtake non-aggressive plants.
Prairie sage (Artemesia ludoviciana)
Yarrow (Achillea milefolium)
Meadow sage (Salvia nemorosa)
Rocky mountain penstemon (Penstemon strictus)
Lupines (various species, Lupinus)
Lamb’s ear (Stachy’s byzantium)
Butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa)
Jupiter’s beard (Ceranthus ruber)
Bearded iris (Iris germanica)
Siberian iris (Iris siberica)
Black-eyed Susan (Rudbekia hirta)
Purple coneflower (Ecinacea sp)
Globe thistle (Echinops rito)

Another way to quickly conquer space in a new meadow garden is by scattering seed around the perennial starts. Some commercialized “wildflower garden” seed mixes contain a wide range of annuals and perennials to fill a garden. I tend to avoid blends because I like to be more intentional around plant placement and develop drifts of the same species.

My favorite starter seed types to spread in the garden:

Blue grama grass (Boudeloua gracilis)
California poppy (Eschscholzia californica)
Sunflower (Helianthus annum) — the regular wild kind. I often use plain bird seed! It’s cheap in bulk, and the plants are drought-tolerant and multi-flowered, grow quickly in any soil and attract birds.
Blanket flower (Gallardia) — this is a short-lived perennial but often blooms the first year
Penstemon species — if the garden is dry or non-mulched, they should have a good establishment rate. In thick mulch they may not.
Prairie coneflower (Ratibida pinnata)

Finally, when the core garden plants are in place, you can add dimension and detail to the garden by introducing a few non-spreading accent plants that hold their own against their aggressive neighbors. Some of them are tall spires that break through the surrounding plants. Some start growing early in the spring to avoid competition. The rest line the garden’s edges and paths, where bright sun reaches lower levels.

Some of the showier, non-spreading meadow garden companions include:

Blue oat grass (Helictotrichon sempervirens)
Various non-creeping Sedums, although some groundcover sedums can fill gaps as well
Blue fescue (Festuca glauca)
Daylillies (Hemerocalis)
Foxtail lily (Eremurus)
Prairie blazing star (Liatris spicata)
Fall-planted bulbs, particularly Alliums: Allium ‘Purple Sensation’ (Allium aflateunense), Allium ‘Purple Rain,’ ‘Drumstick’ Allium (Allium sphaerocephalon), species tulips, particularly Tulipa clusiana and Tulipa bakeri.

By late sumner of the first year, you can already see many of the new plants filling in. The Russian sage, which has grown large in this photo, was part of the previous garden in this spot so it is much larger than the new plants. Summer 2020.

Maintaining the garden

Few garden plans are so perfect from the get-go that you don’t need any tweaks. You may find a species doesn’t fill in the way you’d like, or that you’d like to expand the color palette. Plan on adding a few more plants here and there as time goes by. You might even choose to toss in a few handfulls of seed. A caution: when over-seeding a garden, I favor adding single species in a section at a time. Although this garden style allows plants to mingle, too many different species growing in the same patch can cause detract from the desirable contrasts found in larger drifts.

After about a year since it was planted, you can see that the meadow garden has already filled in well and is putting on a colorful display. June 2021.

Ultimately, meadow gardens can be very low-maintenance. Weeds have a hard time finding an opening among densely-packed, tough established perennials and grasses. Dead flowers set seed that feeds birds and adds winter interest. Insects and animals move in, enjoying the shelter and food source and keeping each other in check. Pest insects are unlikely to become a nuisance when plant varieties are very diverse and predatory insects are always present. All you have to do is sit back and watch, or do as much or as little as you’d like.

Another view of the Westminster, Colorado garden in early summer 2021.

When to trim back

One popular approach to meadow gardening is to cut dead stems down in late winter, just before green shoots emerge. I leave the downed material in place as mulch. Spring rain and snow will quickly soften and compress it as it is covered by new green growth. Earthworms tug the dead leaves into the soil so they soften and partially decay, at which point they become the worms’ food. You can choose to spot-trim things that bother you or become overgrown, and gently nudge your plants with selective thinning. When a competing plant is ready to grow into the void, the plant you are trying to reduce will stay in check long term. But like always in a meadow garden this work always optional.

Whatever you choose, the basic perspective I employ in meadow gardening is that it’s always much less work than spraying, mowing and aerating a lawn, or reseeding dead patches and managing insect pests. And the meadow garden, with vibrant colors and textures and a host of animal guests, is a lot more fun to watch and explore as time goes on.

A primer on the cactus family, and growing mountain ball cactus, Pediocactus simpsonii, from seed

Cacti make up one of the most diverse and rapidly-evolving plant families in the world, native exclusively to the Americas.

First appearing about 35 million years ago (fairly recent for such a large group of plants), the first cacti were thorny tropical shrubs with woody stems and lush leaves. They’re hardly recognizable as cacti, but you can still see these ancestral plants in the genus Pereskia.

A leafy cacti from the genus *Pereskia* growing in the Kona Airport gardens on the Big Island of Hawaii, hardly recognizable as a cactus except for the clustered thorns on the stem emerging from structures called areoles that are unique to cacti.

Nature’s high-tech survivors

Cacti employ an advanced type of photosynthesis, in which pores only open at night in cool temperatures to absorb carbon dioxide. They bind carbon as malic acid, a very weak acid found in many life forms, in special cell organs called vacuoles. They close their pores at dawn, before the air heats up, then draw four-carbon malic acid molecules into chloroplasts during the day to use it in photosynthesis without losing water to evaporation. Only a few plant families in the world can do this, allowing them to make glucose with minimal water loss. The same process arose independently in bromeliads, orchids and a few other groups.

Many of these carbon-storing plants are succulent, since thick fleshy tissues create more space to store carbon. That trait provided an added benefit of reducing the mass-to-surface area ratio which further limits evaporation, and storing lots of water, for a second level of drought-resilience.

With these evolutionary tools in tow, cacti quickly colonized areas other plants couldn’t. They lost their leaves, climbed into trees in the rainforest where they could grow without soil, advanced up dry rocky cliffsides and mountains, and eventually developed the familiar spherical, paddle and columnar shapes widely recognized as cacti. They then spread into extremely hot and dry areas west of the Andes and across what is now Mexico and the American Southwest.

The most famous cactus, the saguaro, grows in the Sonoran desert where the region’s average 10-15 inches of precipitation per year come in relatively short downpours followed by many dry months. Additionally, rainfall can vary widely year to year—some years receive up to 20 inches of rain and others as little as two. To grow large, plants need to be able to quickly absorb water when it is available and draw from reserves over many months, which cacti do by swelling and gradually contracting.

An epiphitic cactus clings to tree bark in a tropical rainforest. It is able to grow without soil thanks in part to its water-saving biology.

The cactus family’s evolutionary diversification has been remarkably fast, with new cacti species appearing every few thousand years to give us some 2,000 documented kinds today. But because of the tropical origin—to the chagrin of northern gardeners—most cacti are still unable to survive cold winters.

In the cactus family, the genus *Opuntia* has the most species that can survive sub-freezing temperatures.

The genus Opuntia, or prickly pears, are one exception, a large genus containing a lineage that rose with the Rocky Mountains and eventually spread to the plains, eastern U.S. and Canada. Another is the genus Pediocactus.

The Mountain Ball Cactus of the Mountain West

Pediocactus simpsonii, or mountain ball cactus, is one of the hardiest cacti outside Opuntia. Native to the high plains, Rocky Mountains and sagebrush steppe valleys of the western U.S. up into Idaho, Oregon and Montana, the cactus clings to shallow gritty or powdery soils among thirsty pine tree roots and nestled under tufts of bunchgrass or between rocks.

This hardy cactus can reach 11,500 feet in altitude and survive temperatures of 35 degrees below zero (-35°F). It grows to around 3 inches tall by 3 inches wide as single plants or small clusters. Unlike some other globular cacti, it is tolerant of part shade, and in hot dry weather it partially dehydrates and shrinks downward to hide from the sun or herbivores. The small globes plump up with snowmelt or rains in early spring, when they bloom and set fruit, spread by birds.

For a long time I thought these cacti were rare, though perhaps I wasn’t looking close. During the spring of 2021, when most of the Western U.S. was gripped in drought, the grass and wildflowers grew unusually thin, exposing the little cacti in their multitudes.

On a family member’s undeveloped 5-acre property in the foothills west of Berthoud, CO, I came across dozens of them around the bases of planted pinyon pines where they seemed to thrive despite the competition of thirsty tree roots. With permission from the owner (my grandma, who until then had no idea the cacti were there) I picked a few fruits, smashed and strained them and collected the seeds. There were dozens in each crambeery-sized fruit, each one a very hard black sphere about the size of a poppy seed.

Weeks later on a camping trip on BLM land near Radium Hot Springs, a dry forest of pinyon, juniper and sagebrush between higher Rocky Mountain ranges, I found literally thousands of mountain ball cacti—a cluster every few feet among the sagebrush and around the drip lines of pinyon trees. At around 8,000 feet, they were early in the growing season and just starting to bloom.

A pair of *Pediocactus simpsonii* cacti in a sagebrush meadow in a pinyon-juniper forest close to Radium Hot Springs near Kremling, Colorado.

Growing Pediocactus from seed

Pediocactus seeds are reputedly difficult to sprout. Like many plants that thrive in harsh climates, they have internal barriers that ensure their progeny hide away in the soil for years or decades until an opportunity arises. This is commonly referred to as seed dormancy which prevents seeds from sprouting even when they’re moist.

Triggers could include mild spring weather after freezing, a wildfire that clears the ground of competitors, a flash flood that shifts the soil, a dry spell that leaves gaps in the grassland or just the advance of time. Thar way, droughts or events that injure the established plants or leave them unable to bloom for decades won’t wipe out the population as a whole.

The best way to grow the seed, according to most sources, is to plant them in containers outside in a suitable climate and simply wait for the best conditions to occur naturally. That could take six months to a year and even then may only get you a moderate germination rate. With a few contradicting, anecdotal accounts about the best way to grow the seed, I thought I’d subject my seed collection to a science experiment to improve the odds and come to a more objective answer.

Testing various methods of germinating Pediocactus seeds

To test my seeds, I the collection into plastic bags with paper towels and introduced them to a variety of conditions. One bag was not given any treatment, two were scoured with fine sandpaper, one sanded batch and one unsanded batch was moistened and frozen and thawed several times over about two weeks, and one was subjected to the same freeze-thaw treatment dry. Another was wetted with hydrogen peroxide and left at room temperature.

After the treatment, the seeds were planted in a seed tray with mixed sand (50 percent), potting media (25 percent) and vermiculite (25 percent), packed down and covered with an additional 1/8 inch of sand and potting media. The seeds then went into a clear plastic bin and set outdoors for light and warmth to germinate.

At about three weeks in, I’ve spotted my first seedling—a tiny green sphere no bigger than a grain of sand, in the hydrogen peroxide row. That surprised me! I was expecting the sanded+frozen+thawed seeds to emerge first if any did at all.

The first seedling, in the hydrogen peroxide treated (center) row, is barely visible in the lowest cell of this image.

I’ll keep updating to follow the progress of this batch.

What is a crevice garden? An intro to a fun and attractive trend in xeriscape

A crevice garden is a style of garden arranging rocks in layers sticking vertically out of the ground. Originating in the Czech Republic, the crevice gardening style mimics natural rock features and plants growing from cliffs and crags. This charming practice is increasingly popular in the United States, particularly Colorado.

An alpine crevice garden at the Denver Botanic Gardens.

Thousands of species of plants around the world are adapted to grow in small spaces between rocks. In some cases they are so accustomed to this life that the plants—sometimes classified as lithophytes—are difficult to cultivate in typical garden soil. Crevice gardens employ plants with long, wiry, penetrating roots that find water supplies deep in the rocks, but loathe being excessively wet at the base of the stem, and don’t fare well with competition from larger plants.

Additionally, many plants that grow fine in garden soil can adapt to rock crevices—plants like huchera, penstemon, creeping phlox, candytuft, lupines, ajuga, dianthus and more. In nature, cliffside plants even include some trees, which will attain a more compact, dwarf form under the confining conditions. When native pines grow in tight confines they develop natural bonsai appearance and can live for decades or centuries without getting more than a few feet tall.

In a newly-planted crevice garden in my garden, sedums, sempervivums, *Pediocactus*, *Ajuga reptans* and *Liatris punctata* coexist happily despite having varying water needs in a standard garden.

Crevice gardens counterintuitively support plants that need dry conditions to thrive, as well as hosting plants that like moderate moisture, since the roots can reach deep into wetter spots within the rocks. They do this by allowing the root tips to stay wet while the crown stays dry. Plants in these spaces also benefit from not having to fight the aggressive root systems of nearby grass, shrubs and trees.

This is a great technique for growing small succulents and cacti that get lost in an expansive garden, which is helpful because many cold-hardy cacti and succulents are very small and are best viewed up close. Pediocactus, sempervivum (hens and chicks), dwarf prickly pears and small sedums thrive in the cracks. It’s also ideal for many other native Western species adapted to the dry southwest or high Rockies.

Finally, a crevice garden is a great way to garden in the city with a small space! With a few square feet you can plant dozens of small, attractive plants, each in its own spot, without any being overtaken by the others. It is remarkably weed-resistant, is virtually maintenance free, and combines the aesthetics of stone structure with the seasonal change and movement of live plants.

Bringing tropical cuttings and seeds to life

If you love plants, coming home from a trip with a bunch of seeds and plants in tow is like adding an extra day to your vacation.

All but a single one of these bags was approved at the USDA checkpoint to travel from Hawaii to the mainland, since the U.S. government is primarily concerned about the risks of transporting pests contained in commercial crops and fruit. As tropical plants washed free of soil, pulp, cotton, leaf spots and bound for a quarantined indoors setting, there’s little risk that any would become invasive threats in Colorado’s snowy climate.

Like an 8 year old back from trick-or-treating with a cache of Halloween candy, you spread your bounty out over the kitchen table and sort through what you got. After making some quick strategic plans, it’s off to the local garden store to buy some extra seed trays and plastic domes to get started.

Out of the dozens of types of plants I got though the USDA inspection in Hawaii, I feel relatively confident I can grow all but few. The philodendron vines and Monstera are notoriously easy to propagate from stem cuttings, even in plain water. I have two types of Crinum asiaticum (spider lily) seeds, which I’ve grown before and know they’re basically foolproof. Croton cuttings are also fairly easy to root in soil or water, although one of my cuttings is looking pretty wilted after shipping and I’m not sure if it will make it.

A batch *Crinum asiaticum*, or spider lily, seeds planted in a simple seed tray in vermiculite and potting mix. These are very easy to sprout—I figure all 6 out of 6 will survive.

An African tulip tree in Kona covered with flowers and big pods full of seeds.

One species I’m less sure about are the Spathodea campanulata seeds, known commonly as the African tulip tree, which reportedly have low germination rates. The pod I found on a tree growing next to a parking lot in Kona contained what looked like thousands of seeds—a dense, loose mass of flat, lightweight seeds, each imbedded in a thin cellophane-like sheet of tissue. Even the slightest breeze scatters the ultra-lightweight seeds into the air, where they flutter around like mosquitos. (This was an annoyance to the group I traveled with, when a swarm sparkly seeds blasted out of the pod on the dash and into the cab when the air conditioner came on.)

The seeds are plentiful and extremely gregarious travelers, but this plant’s reproduction strategy to is to produce its seeds en masse and allow them to spread far, with lower emphasis on each one’s viability. I’m worried there’s a chance the entire batch dried out too much while it was still on the tree and none will sprout.

The seeds of the African tulip tree are extremely lightweight and plentiful. This bag of seeds came from a single, banana-shaped pod. Although the seeds have a relatively low germination rate, it’s easy to see how *Spathodea campanulata* has become such an aggressive invader in tropical forests where it has been introduced outside its native range. These are headed to a seed tray to see if any will sprout, and will remain indoors as houseplants if they do.

I’m also less sure about the single, grape-sized seed pod I found in a refuse pile in the Maka’eo walking path garden at the old Kona airport (an amazing garden to visit if you are ever in the vicinity, by the way). I thought I knew what it was—I initially thought it was a Euphorbia neohumbertii—but now I’m looking that species up and having some doubts my ID was correct. In any case, the three seeds, which fit snugly in the three-chambered pod and have hard casings that resemble pine nuts, seem like they might be temperamental when it comes to watering the right amount. (An aside: these gardens are amazing place to visit if you are interested in looking at a wide range of tropical plants and succulents. But, though the gardens are unguarded, please don’t pluck any attached plant parts or take out any fallen fruit or other useful material. The gardens are maintained by local people, and theft of valuable plants and food crops has been a problem there).

Finally, I have some seeds from an Aloe of some sort that was absolutely covered in open pods, and a sandwich bag of seeds rom a large planting of Stapelia (also known as “carrion flower”) in Kona that was spewing its cottony fluff all over the sidewalk and beyond. The Stapelia pods look remarkably similar to those of milkweeds, as do the seeds themselves, so I looked the genus up and found Stapelia comes from the same subfamily as milkweed, Asclepiadoideae.

A mound of *Stapelia*, or carrion flower, growing at the community garden in the old airport in Kona. It turns out, *Stapelia* is in the same family as milkweed.

(It’s fascinating, the connections you can make when you know a bit about taxonomy. You can walk into a new environment, knowing hardly anything about the plant species there, and quickly identify a bunch of plants with Google by searching your location + the plant family or genus a specimen seems to belong to).

In any case, I have never grown Aloe nor Stapelia from seed, and sometimes these drought-loving plants can be temperamental to water properly in shallow trays. So we’ll see what happens.

I’ve been fascinated by the seeds from a Delonix regia tree, also known as royal ponciana or flame tree. Coming from an enormous dangling pod, which I left in Hawaii to reduce the risk of carrying pathogens, the seeds look like elongated beans. But unlike beans they come in a waterproof, waxy casing that prevents them from swelling even when soaked in pure water. It’s a strategy many plants and trees employ to encourage their seeds to last longer before they sprout, which gives them more of a chance to spread far and wide or emerge at the right times.

Many varieties of Lupine have a similar seed coating, which makes sense because they are also members of the Fabaceae or pea family, and this is something that can make their propagation more complicated. In the case of Lupine, the translucent seed coating is degraded by winter freeze-thaw cycles, fire, or long periods of time in general, helping the plant to get at least some of its seedlings to lie dormant in the seed bank and spring up in optimum conditions in early spring or after a wildfire clears competitors away. But Delonix regia, a tropical species, doesn’t live with cold winters or with recurrent fire (as far as I know). Instead, I wonder if the casing naturally dissolves in the stomach of an animal or bird, and sprouts great distances away in piles of poop.

In any case, I set seven seeds to soak in a tray of water and none of them looked any different after 24 hours. As a test I scoured the corners of two seeds with a piece of sandpaper, and sure enough, they began swelling from the scoured end, stretching and ripping the waxy coat apart until the entire seed had swelled.

Delonix regia (flame tree) seeds soaking in water. The two larger seeds were scoured at one end with sandpaper, allowing the seed to swell with water and break out of the waxy waterproof coating. The rest look exactly like they did before they went into the tray.

I’m also unsure about the viability of the Terminalia catappa, or sea almond seeds, which were easy to find all over the beaches in Hawaii. Supposedly these too are fickle to grow from seed—many of the seeds cores rot out during the long time that passes between the moment they fall and when the right conditions come along to germinate. The interestingly almond-shaped, lightweight, corky seeds evolved to float in sea water and colonize distant beaches, but are hard to pry open and I was unable to cut any open with the tools I had on hand during my trip. I’m excited about the seeds because the attractive, large-leafed trees seem to be a potential substitution for fiddle leaf figs, which are extremely trendy houseplants, but, in my opinion, are not well suited to life indoors. Fiddle leaf figs are just too finnicky, languishing in the low-light conditions in most homes and developing unsightly spots or dropping leaves at the slightest provocation.

Clusia rosea is another candidate I hope to use to fill the role of the fiddle leaf fig, and I got a few tiny seeds along with some cuttings. The seeds are small and come imbedded in a sticky orange goo that helps them attach to mature trees in a wet forest, germinate on a branch, send aerial roots down to the ground and ultimately overwhelm or strangle the unfortunate host tree. The seeds dry out and die easily (I planted six and the rest were dry and dead within a day), but the cuttings seem resilient, staying very plump and green in transport.

Additionally, there are some dry Pandanus tectorius (screwpine) seeds in my cache, a rare Hawaiian native plant that happens to be extensively cultivated, and I was able to collect the dry seeds from the lawn at a resort.

I’m fortunate to be somewhere with a lot of light, and the plants are getting started in a humidity dome to help them root and also give me a chance to discard any that show signs of flies or disease. However, they’ve all been rinsed and soaked, plucked and preened, and have had any spotted or damaged leaves removed. I’m not expecting any problems, and can’t wait to see what some of them turn out like.

A cutting of *Clusia rosea*, or autograph tree. I have no experience with them but I think they will be very easy to root because the cuttings are still plump and green with no wilting even after days in transport.

What I’m Working On

After several posts on gardening science, it’s as good a time as any for some background on myself and how I came to starting this blog.

From 2016-2019, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. I worked as a copywriter and was experimenting in landscape design/installation with another designer who specializes in native California plants. (If you’re in the Bay Area and need a garden upgrade, I highly recommend checking out his website at evancooperdesign.com.) I’ve been an avid gardener my whole life, but Evan introduced me to the “meadow garden” style. He also gave me some useful principles in hardscaping and a deeper appreciation for grasses and plants native to the American West.

An Oakland, California garden designed and installed by Evan Cooper Design.

My background is in journalism, but I really enjoyed working with Evan. Beyond our easy working relationship, I loved working with my hands rather than computer screen. At the same time we were contributing to wildlife habitats and eco-friendly landscapes in an urban area. I was considering getting more involved in landscape work and education about horticulture.

That changed in May 2019. I broke my leg in a scooter accident, scrambling all those considerations. The injury was on the serious side—tibial plateau fractures usually cause major ligament and cartilage damage which in turn causes loss of mobility and triggers arthritis. More immediately, after a tibial plateau fracture, you probably won’t be walking for 3 months. I moved in with my parents in Westminster, Colorado to recover and regain the ability to walk, start rehab and embark on the long process of regaining the muscle strength and balance necessary to do rigorous physical work.

Just after I started walking again, an even bigger crisis struck my family. My mom was unexpectedly diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. My 61-year old mom had been a health nut her whole life, and the diagnosis was a shock, (although it’s no surprise to science that cancer often strikes at random).

Pancreatic adenocarcenoma usually brings an abysmal prognosis; fewer than 1 in 5 patients survive the first year and and only 3 percent of stage IV are alive in year 5. The only hope was in clinical trials, and we asked several oncologists for recommendations. At the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, doctors found an experimental immunotherapy drug that looked promising. The logic behind the drug’s mechanism of action made sense to me, and as a participant of the trial my mom would continue to receive the standard chemotherapy alongside the experimental treatment. (For anyone struggling with a serious illness for which there are few or no adequate treatment options, I definitely suggest seeking out clinical studies. They offer not only the opportunity to try cutting-edge treatment, but also contribute to the body of knowledge that will help other people).

Early results were promising—after 6 weeks on the trial my mom’s tumors shrank significantly and many disappeared in imaging. We currently have no way of knowing if my mom’s progress is thanks to the experimental drug, an uncommonly strong response to the standard chemo, or some combination of both. At the very least, I can say that after 9 months on treatment my mom’s cancer is stable and smaller than it was when she was diagnosed. It may not be a “cure,” but we definitely expect my mom to outlive the typical survival time for pancreatic cancer.

At the same time, my mom is still immunocompromised and at high risk of serious illness during COVID-19. I’ve decided to stay home and social distance strictly to keep her safe and help look after her, and I’ve used the time to pick up a few part-time landscaping clients for income (so I can work outside and away from infectious people), and meanwhile do a full redesign of the my parents’ yard, including new trees, a woodland garden, vegetable boxes, a meadow garden, a desert garden, a native plant area, a cottage garden and a pond expansion to built a large aquatic garden and wetland area. That also gave me the time to start this blog!

Meadow desert garden — Part of a newly-planted meadow-themed garden (foreground) and a desert-themed garden (behind) under construction.

So without further adeiu, here’s a video of what I’ve been building this summer.