|
A
Recipe for
Enjoying
Autumn
Landscapes
Fall Oak
(Scottsbluff 2007) |
|
Cool mornings, warm afternoons,
shorter (and shorter) days and evenings. Throw in a
few more “breezy” days, and you don’t have to be a
meteorologist to know that fall is on the way. Fall
is a season of transition as the garden’s plants
complete their seasonal growing cycle and prepare
for winter. But the end of summer need not mean the
end of a colorful and visually interesting garden.
The first frost, now on average
from three to four weeks off, will end the life of
unprotected tender annuals, but it will only ripen
the color of ornamental grasses and begin the
garden’s transition to its distinctive winter
displays of evergreen foliage, the persistent fruits
of crabapples and shrub roses, the strongly upright
maroon and straw colored clumps of ornamental
grasses, and the resilient stems and seed heads of
last summer’s exuberant garden flowers
Fall Grasses and Shrubs
(Scottsbluff 2007) |
|
Wyobraska is not New England—a
region whose climate and indigenous plants combine
to produce dependable, spectacular, and long
displays of fall foliage. To develop the potential
autumn enjoyment of Wyobraska requires incorporating
into your garden or landscape the plants that
provide the distinctive fall color and interest of
this region. In fact, fall is a good time to test
the “regional adaptability” of your landscape. If
your landscape or garden doesn’t look healthy,
colorful, and visually interesting throughout the
fall, the chances are that you have a lot of poorly
adapted plants.
It’s one of the reasons why fall is a good time for
the do-it-yourself homeowner to do those landscape
renovation projects. You’ll be less likely to buy
those poorly adapted spring plants and more likely
to buy the well-adapted fall plants—simply because
they look better now. I suggest you try the
following recipe for developing a landscape or
garden with good autumn enjoyment potential |
|
Previous Articles
It's
Finally Spring - March 13
Spring Garden Calendar-March 20
No
Garden Left Behind-March 27
Planting Trees for a Cooler Earth in a Warmer
WyoBraska-April 3
Viburnums - Shrubs for Wyobraska Springs-April 10
Want A Water Conserving Lawn? You might already have
one-
April 17
Creating Long
Term
Tree-lationships April 24
Bigger, Bolder, Brighter,
Better—and Back In The Landscape May 01 & 08
Hardy Shrub
Roses
May 15
Another Look
at Native Plants
May 22
No Child
Left Inside
May 29
June
is Tree Care Month June 05
Summer Blooming Shrubs
June 12
Roses Are
Red.....
June 19
The Plants They will be Talking About Next Year at
the Garden Walk
June 26
Busy Summertime Gardens
July 03
Cutting Your Lawn Down to Size
July 10
July 17
Insect Paranoia
If It Will Grow In Wyoming...
July 24
Rain Gardens
July31
WyoBraska Native Grass & Wildflower Lawn
August 7
A Real WyoBraska Peach?
(Fruit Trees) August 14
Fall is for Planting
August 21
2007 Articles
2006 Articles |
|
The changes that occur in a
garden or landscape through the summer are the slow,
incremental changes of plant growth, of flowers
forming buds, of buds opening to flowers, of flowers
gradually turning to seed head. But with the first
frost, the seasonal changes of autumn will be
wholesale—entire plants and groups of plants will
change color within a few days, trees and shrubs
will be transformed from masses of green to
silhouettes of gray branches and stems within the
span of two weeks, evergreen trees and shrubs,
camouflaged among the summer leaves of deciduous
trees and shrubs emerge from the background to
assume their prominent role in the landscape for the
coming winter, the colorful masses of summer flowers
will become the patches of erect deep brown
stalks—potential perches for the smaller of the
birds that will feed on the garden’s buffet of seeds
through the winter.
Autumn is also the primary
flowering season for several essential plants in any
western prairie garden or landscape. Asters, tall
sedums, and the ornamental prairie grasses—big blue
stem, little blue stem, switch grass, and Indian
grass. These essential plants soften the effect of
summer’s departure by extending the flower season of
the garden into late October or even early
November. Ornamental grasses don’t bloom, as such,
but there can be no question that autumn is the
primary season of effect for the ornamental prairie
grasses. They finally achieve their full size in
early September, filling the visual void left by
summer’s fading flowers, and then begin to turn
their distinctive fall colors of russet, burgundy,
maroon, and orange. Not until winter arrives in
late December will the intensity of the fall color
of the grasses begin to fade.
If you landscape is made up
primarily of lilacs, spireas, barberries, and
assorted other common “alien” species, your autumn
landscape experience will be considerably
diminished. Most of these widely sold, and I think
overused, landscape plants do not grow well in
Wyobraska, and while some of them do develop good
fall leaf color in other regions of the country with
longer growing seasons, most of these shrubs rarely
develop good fall color here, leaving only a short
and unpredictable spring flowering and good, but
often short-lived, early summer foliage as their
only redeeming value. |
|
|
Recipe for
Autumn Landscape Enjoyment
List of Ingredients
Compost—enough to place a 2 inch depth over
entire bed
Sulfur—enough to spread 5-10 lbs. per 100
Square feet over entire bed
Shredded Wood Mulch—enough to cover entire
bed with 3-4 inch depth
1/3 Evergreen trees and shrubs (avoid
Colorado spruce in small landscapes)
1/3 Deciduous shrubs (tall, upright shrubs
for “structure”, medium shrubs like shrub
roses, butterfly bush, and red-twigged
dogwood, for summer, fall and winter
interest
1/3 Perennials and ornamental grasses—select
2/3 perennials that bloom summer and fall.
Directions
Prepare landscape bed by spreading 2 inches
compost over entire bed area, and spread
5-10 lbs. sulfur per 100 Square feet of
bed. Loosely till or otherwise coarsely
incorporate soil amendments.
Develop a planting plan to fill the bed
space with the proportions of each type of
plant as outlined above. (Remember, most
Wyobraska perennials get as large as small
shrubs and need to be spaced from 2 to 5
feet apart.)
Plant the plants.
Mulch entire bed with 3-4 inches shredded
wood mulch.
|
 Rural
Rural Scotts Bluff County 2006 |