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It’s Theatre West Garden Walk
time already, with the “so many I can’t remember how
many” annual event kicking off this Saturday morning
at 8 a.m. It has not been an easy spring for this
year’s host gardeners, with late freezes, wind,
hail, and frequent storms plaguing the region. But
the Theatre West Garden Walk has always been
intended both as a display of some of the region’s
most colorful gardens and landscapes, and as an
educational opportunity for the region’s avid and
would-be avid gardeners. This year’s event may
offer a little less display thanks to recent storms,
but it should offer more than normal education
thanks to a record setting stretch of winter and
spring weather.
The established plants in this
year’s gardens will have survived early fall
blizzards, record setting winter snowfall, a hard
late spring freeze, and multiple spring
hailstorms. The lessons to be learned from this
year’s garden walk are likely to be about the many
plants that not only survived nine months of some of
the most extreme Wyobraska weather in decades, but
are now thriving and colorful in spite of that
weather.
About 10 days ago I had an
opportunity to take a prairie garden walk through a
real prairie in eastern Wyoming. Unlike the
domesticated gardens that will be featured on the
Garden Walk, the garden that is the region’s
relatively undisturbed prairie has found the past
year’s extreme weather to be very much to its
liking. Mostly it likes the abundant snow and
rain, and of course, early fall blizzards and hard
late spring freezes are of no concern to the prairie
grasses and wildflowers that have seen all of this
many times before.
This year’s abundant rainfall
is providing a opportunity to see the region’s
indigenous landscape at it’s very best. Avid and
would-be avid gardeners that would like to get a
sense of the “place” in which they live have a once
in a decade or so opportunity to experience our
native prairie at its best this year. I have lived
in western Nebraska for over 30 years now, and can
only recall three or four years with the prairie as
lush and flower-filled as it is this year. I
suspect that two years of normal to above normal
precipitation will have the region’s prairies filled
with wildflowers throughout the summer—providing an
extended opportunity for what I think is a rare
opportunity to experience shortgrass prairie at its
finest.
Aside from friends or
acquaintances with well managed prairie lands, the
region’s well-known and not-so-well-known tourist
attractions should offer excellent opportunities to
enjoy a relaxing prairie garden walk. Scottsbluff
National Monument, Agate Fossil Beds, the Wildcat
Hills Nature Center, Ft. Laramie, and Fort Robinson
and Toadstool Park all offer trails and hiking
opportunities that should be colorful prairie garden
walks this summer. What I enjoy about these walks
is the opportunity to experience blend of prairie
grasses and flowers in the prairie settings, and the
mix of pine, juniper, shrubs, prairie grass, and
wildflowers in the “forested” settings like
Scottsbluff National Monument and Fort Robinson.
Observing how these different types of plants grow
next to each other in natural settings can suggest
similar combinations to try in your own garden or
landscape. Mother Nature is a great teacher to
those patient enough and observant enough to attend
her classes.
I haven’t been out there for
many years, but I also suggest a trip to Crescent
Lake National Wildlife Refuge north of Oshkosh.
Many years ago they had a well-marked hike through a
native sandhills prairie. My recollection is that
it was one of the real treat at the end of a winding
30 mile drive. One of the best features of this
location is the total absence of train horns and
other similarly disrupting noises of less remote
prairie gardens. Gardens are best enjoyed in their
natural silence with only the sounds of birds and
dragonflies and the rustling of waving grasses
occasionally interrupting the remarkable quiet of
these remote places. The silence alone is a
memorable experience in our modern, 24-7, lives.
I hope to see you at the Garden
Walk this Saturday or perhaps at another prairie
garden walk elsewhere around the region this summer.
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