prairie point

larkspurs and primroses

This is the view out our dining room window. Click on it to see a bigger image. Five years ago it was a bermuda grass lawn. Then while I added a wall of windows to what we now call our "sun room" this area became a repository for lumber and construction debris. That was when the sunflowers moved in.

Several years before that a sunflower came up in a nearby shady bed. It had probably been a stowaway on a plant we had received from a friend. It only got a foot or so tall but there was always another one or two every year. But when I stopped mowing around the construction debris, lo and behold we had a whole crop of sunflowers springing up around it and they got to be 8 feet tall! They provided lots of entertainment during the hot summer. Insects loved them. Birds loved to dive down and pick the insects off. There was a big grasshopper invasion that year and we were thankful that they preferred the sunflowers to anything in our nearby vegetable garden.

This area is one of the sunniest spots in our yard. It also has a slight drainage problem when it rains. So I got the idea of developing a dry creek bed there that would help carry away the rainfall. The next spring I pulled up the sunflower seedlings, dug a trench for my creek bed and planted native plants around it. We still had a few sunflowers come up there but they had now spread to every corner of the yard. We always let a few survive in one place or another.

Now these larkspurs have moved in. They came from a seed mixture that I had sowed in the back part of the yard. There are a few back there now too but I guess they have decided they like it here better.