My city is making strides, bit by bit, in creating areas of partly native plant landscapes. It’s certainly good to see. Yet new spaces are still often dominated by the same exotic plants you’d see in any city across the country (Karl Foerster I’m looking at you) and large slabs of impermeable concrete. I don’t know how we can get away from using redundant plants that don’t celebrate regional diversity, but instead inspire a true sense of place, let alone ending the practice of evenly spacing plants or lining them up like dominoes. Maybe I’ve gone off topic. I probably have. So let’s look at some spaces that feature native plants — then tell us what you think!
First up is our new park downtown called Union Plaza. It’s billed as a gathering place on the edge of the business district which features a performance space and much public art. Awesome. A new pollinator habitat of a few thousand feet is also going in to replace lawn.
Above is a hillside planted in Rudbeckia and a cultivar of blue grama grass. On other sides are Baptisia, rattlesnake master, coneflowers, and Amsonia. You can see the same grass below in one of the sculptures.
Winecup makes a nice drought tolerant ground cover.
There are two rain gardens / bioswales in town that are just lovely and planted with a diversity of native forbs, grasses, and even shrubs, as is the case for this one that filters a restaurant’s parking lot:
A very massive rain garden.
Another is at the entrance of a park’s nature center and large urban prairie (the latter of which we helped burn this spring):
Pioneers Park bioswale.
For an even bigger example of a rain garden one has to head to Tyrrell Park, which serves to manage storm water runoff. It must be an acre or two in size, and I arrived between flower shows:
Signs are key for projects that might seem “messy” or have no obvious purpose.
I have to say, though, that what pleased me the most this summer was finding curbside beds on a downtown street. Shocking. Delightful. Gimme more.
Can you believe it? Liatris ligulistylis in a city. IN A CITY. With a monarch!
Of course, my alma mater and where I teach is, in my opinion, behind the times and working hard to get even further behind. One of the gardens at the University of Nebraska features some medium-sized rectangular beds with about a 50/50 mix of natives:
And the Cather Garden (to celebrate Willa Cather), west of Love Library, has a few small beds in angular areas where sidewalks meet, though it sounds like these might be coming out because the plants — misplaced in my opinion — sometimes flop out into the sidewalk (such plants were already removed near the renowned Sheldon Museum of Art and replaced with Asiatic lilies). What’s definitely coming out is the buffalo grass after administrators said they wanted something that greens up earlier, like fescue, and apparently something that requires more watering, mowing, and fertilizing.
Soothing, soft, drought-tolerant buffalo grass.
In a perfect world the medians and sidewalk beds of Lincoln would almost entirely feature native plants, and plants used in artful and surprising ways. We’ve been adding public art, open spaces, parks, and bike trails in our city at a frenetic pace, but the understanding and use of native plants lags far behind. And yet, there are examples that begin to inspire and show the possibilities, and I’m thankful for whatever of Nebraska we can get in to the state capitol. How’s your city doing?
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