Rewilding My Lot

There is a small area toward the back of the garden that I have designated for mid-height prairie grasses. Developing this area has been confounded by the fact that I am not very good at identifying grasses.

Here’s a summary of what has happened in this area in the past year:

• I seeded Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) and Waco Indiangrass (Sorghastrum nutans). [Spring 2023 & Oct 2023]
• Because I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to identify grasses as they grew, I also bought a pot of Little Bluestem, split the clump into six portions, and planted those. These would be my example plants that I could use to compare with others that grew. [Sep 2023]
• Pretty much all the grasses in this area froze back over the winter.
• As new things grew in the spring and summer of 2024, it was challenging to discern what I had and therefore whether I wanted to keep it. I kept things that were tall grasses or interesting volunteers — if something is new to me, usually I have to wait for it to bloom before I can identify it.
• Seven distinct clumps of grass grew that looked as if they might be native prairie grasses. Six of them had blue stems and the one that didn’t was very tall. [Aug 2024]
• Of the blue-stemmed grasses, two of the clumps had wider leaves but I thought that could be explained by variation between the plants that were introduced by transplant or seed. As I found later, I was wrong.
• I had to let the very tall grass clump produce flower stalks before I could properly identify it, by which time it was 7 feet tall and 15 feet wide. After all that waiting it turned out to be Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), which is a good native grass but too big for my space. I removed it. [Aug 2024]
• By September, the Little Bluestem grasses had begun to flower. While I was away for ten days, the two mismatched blue-stemmed clumps produced completely different flower heads from the ones I knew to be Little Bluestem. To my surprise and pleasure, these are the Waco Indiangrass that I seeded last fall.
• So after all this time and uncertainty, I appear to have four clumps of Little Bluestem and two clumps of Waco Indiangrass. This is a good start. Both kinds of grass are now seeding.

In this photo, Waco Indiangrass is on the left and Little Bluestem is on the right. Now that they have grown bigger I can more clearly see a difference in the leaves.

This is a Little Bluestem flower head:

And this is a Waco Indiangrass flower head:

And here are the two grass types in silhouette: