Grassy fireworks - another fall wonder

These flowers (when it comes to grasses, the experts prefer to use the term inflorescence) from one of my Miscanthus grasses look like fireworks going off. Isn't that fun?

A fireworks picture I took in the summer
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Mid-summer blooms in profusion

These pictures are of a large flower bed that we call the well bed because that's where our well is - right beside the blue spruce, but hidden from view.

Beyond the well bed in a low area there is our pond, and behind that in the second picture you can see a huge flower bed. It's more than 150 feet long and 20 feet wide. We used to call it the Oudolf bed, after Dutch garden guru Piet Oudolf, whose ideas inspired that planting style.

For the past three years, I've treated this bed as a wild garden or meadow, doing minimal weeding and maintenance, allowing lots of self-seeding. It's largely populated with North American native perennials - most of which we grew from seed - plus ornamental grasses.

It still looks wonderful, even though I decided to abandon it to cut our work load down. I'll write more about this bed in a future post.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Scenes from our meadow

The meadow on our property is my favorite site for garden photography right now.

By nature I'm a night-hawk, not an early riser, but it's rewarding to get up at 6 in the morning and go out with the camera to capture the wildflowers.

I need to get up early because some time between 7:30 and 8am it gets too breezy to photograph. When the flowers start dancing, I go in for breakfast.

These pictures are from this morning and early yesterday. The dominant prairie plants in flower at the moment are the greyheaded coneflower (Ratibida pinnata), Echinaceas (E. purpurea, and E. pallida, the latter just past its prime), wild bergamot or beebalm (Monarda fistulosa) and prairie blazing star (Liatris pycnostachya), above right, with Ratibida.

Prairie ballerinas: grey-headed coneflowers (Ratibida pinnata)
Purple coneflowers with bergamot
For more on our meadow and how we got it established from seed in 2000, visit this page on my website.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener