Rewilding My Lot

October is a good time to put the wildflower meadow in front of the house to bed for the winter. It’s a seasonal project, so to keep the area tidy this is when it gets a good trim. The process for 2025 was largely the same as I did in October 2024.

The plants still growing on October 22, 2025 were primarily Spotted Beebalm aka Spotted Horsemint (Monarda punctata), Beach Sunflower (Helianthus debilis), and Yellow Sneezeweed (Helenium amarum). The beebalm was seeded intentionally in 2023; the others were volunteers. (The larger sunflowers in these photos are actually a metal ornament!)

Here’s a photo of a Spotted Beebalm plant with hopefully a lot of viable seed.

Also in the front yard are two oak trees, a baby Mexican Buckeye (Ungnadia speciosa) tree, and a few transplanted Mealy Blue Sage (Salvia farinacea). I have marked the Mexican Buckeye and Mealy Blue Sage plants so that I don’t accidentally mow them down.

First I cut down the sunflowers and sneezeweeds with pruners. After they are dry, they can be shredded and added back somewhere in the garden as mulch. The beebalms were cut down, then cut into smaller pieces to be mulched in place by the mower — I’d like to encourage as much of that seed as possible to stay in the meadow area.

Then I mowed the area at at a fairly low setting. The area is very dry because we are in a drought period. However, I’m hopeful that things will perk up when we finally get rain. By now there must be a significant number of wildflower seeds on the ground yet to germinate.

There are also some things that are obviously alive now. Below are some examples.

The Mexican Buckeye sapling, which I will need to protect if we have a freeze this winter.

A few small Mealy Blue Sage plants. I could have mowed these down also, but they are so newly transplanted that I decided to leave them as they are. Besides, this one has a bloom that may generate more seed for the meadow.

Some Bluebonnets have already germinated, and these leaf rosettes will stay small through the winter.

When I was photographing a Mealy Blue Sage, I spotted a very new Bluebonnet (the small pair of round leaves below). Most likely this has sprouted because of my watering the nearby sage plant. This is an encouraging sign that rain will trigger more germinations.

There is a small area of Frogfruit in the meadow area. I don’t recall planting it, but maybe I did. I don’t want Frogfruit to take over the meadow, so I do pull quite a bit of this out. There is plenty of vigorously growing Frogfruit nearby, so it’s not necessary in the meadow area.

And of course there is Bermudagrass. I have never intentionally killed Bermudagrass in the front yard but I actively encourage its competitors. It is not happy, but it is alive, and it will green up once we get some rain and cooler temperatures.