Stalwart Survivors
In the sometimes harsh environment of South Central Kansas, I find it instructive to notice what trees, shrubs, and flowers survive for a long time in unattended places like abandoned farmsteads, old cemeteries, and neglected roadsides and ungrazed pastures.
Right now on our coffee table stands a lovely bouquet of pink apple blossoms. They were gathered by my friend who had gone to the trouble of asking the landowner of a deserted farm if she could pick them for me. They cheer me every time I look at them.
I remember Sunday afternoon childhood walks to a place near us where only the outline of a foundation remained where a house had once stood. But the irises around it were alive and well.
Peonies grew at the graves outside a long-empty white, wood-framed church building our family worshipped in for about ten years after it was purchased by a member of our congregation. Spirea flourished by the front steps to the church.
Daylillies carpet one of the few very steep roadside banks on the route I used to take to school while I was in college. Its sharp incline apparently has protected it all these years from fastidious operators of the roadside mowing machines.
Lilacs now growing in our yard were once shoots transplanted from the old barn by the pasture my father rented for many years.
Along railroad right-of-ways, unmowed roadsides, and in ungrazed pastures, every year I see waves of lovely prairie grasses that are now being offered in the nursery trade. The wildflowers among them add to my list of candidates flowers such as blazing star, blanketflower, goldenrod, coreopsis, pitcher sage, vervain, winecup, purple coneflower, sunflower, spiderwort, yarrow, artemesia, butterfly weed, false indigo, daisy fleabane, wild larkspur, globemallow, pincushion cactus, prickly pear cactus, yucca, wild onion and garlic, and possibly others I'm forgetting at the moment.
In any locale, scouting abandoned homesites and cemeteries and poorly maintained areas seems like a good way to identify failsafe candidates for creating a low-maintenance landscape of your own. I see it as learning from the Creator of the natural world, and benefiting from the wise investment of people who lived here long ago.
Right now on our coffee table stands a lovely bouquet of pink apple blossoms. They were gathered by my friend who had gone to the trouble of asking the landowner of a deserted farm if she could pick them for me. They cheer me every time I look at them.
I remember Sunday afternoon childhood walks to a place near us where only the outline of a foundation remained where a house had once stood. But the irises around it were alive and well.
Peonies grew at the graves outside a long-empty white, wood-framed church building our family worshipped in for about ten years after it was purchased by a member of our congregation. Spirea flourished by the front steps to the church.
Daylillies carpet one of the few very steep roadside banks on the route I used to take to school while I was in college. Its sharp incline apparently has protected it all these years from fastidious operators of the roadside mowing machines.
Lilacs now growing in our yard were once shoots transplanted from the old barn by the pasture my father rented for many years.
Along railroad right-of-ways, unmowed roadsides, and in ungrazed pastures, every year I see waves of lovely prairie grasses that are now being offered in the nursery trade. The wildflowers among them add to my list of candidates flowers such as blazing star, blanketflower, goldenrod, coreopsis, pitcher sage, vervain, winecup, purple coneflower, sunflower, spiderwort, yarrow, artemesia, butterfly weed, false indigo, daisy fleabane, wild larkspur, globemallow, pincushion cactus, prickly pear cactus, yucca, wild onion and garlic, and possibly others I'm forgetting at the moment.
In any locale, scouting abandoned homesites and cemeteries and poorly maintained areas seems like a good way to identify failsafe candidates for creating a low-maintenance landscape of your own. I see it as learning from the Creator of the natural world, and benefiting from the wise investment of people who lived here long ago.
posted by Mrs. I at
11:10 PM
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