Purpose:

Working as a restoration ecologist in Chicagoland I have learned first-hand how drastically the original plant communities of this region have been altered or destroyed altogether.  The once lush and diverse prairies, wetlands, forests and savannas are consistently and increasingly diminished or eliminated mainly from building and road developments, agriculture and invasive species infringement.  Luckily, there are people around who recognize the beauty and importance of preserving the interesting and diverse habitats that once flourished in our area.  Many rapidly vanishing remnant plant communities are small, fragmented patches of land that go about unnoticed behind warehouses or beneath power-lines, places that somehow manage to retain some of their pre-colombian ecological structure amidst the onslaught of the industrial revolution and euro-american development.  Some places do remain relatively in-tact but most require the intervention of humans to eradicate invasive plants.  


My idea for this blog is simply to demonstrate the beauty of some of the plants that have been lost and are largely overlooked by the majority of the population in the region.  I also want to set an example for other people in hopes that they might be inspired to cultivate native gardens in urban environments.  Together we will be able to re-introduce biodiversity in some of the most "unlikely" places. 


My garden is a small elevated planting bed in Chicago.  I have introduced about 30 species of plants mostly via seeding and some bare-root plantings.  I did most of the seeding last fall and am extremely excited to see what comes up. The garden lies beneath a large Catalpa tree and is lit during much of the day with filtered sunlight.  Therefore, the plant composition is a mixture of Savanna and Forest species. So far things are pretty uneventful but I know in the next couple of weeks some good things will start happening.   

Bottlebrush Grass (Hystrix patula) this cool season grass remains green all year.  It looks a bit sad right now but I'm sure in a month it will be flourishing.  These were planted from plugs I obtained from a fellow native plant enthusiast last fall.