I grew up in a small town of retired farmers in Freeport, Illinois, west of Rockford. My parents’ yard included many native plants, but we didn’t think of them that way.
This is an excerpt from the Wild Ones Journal
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Instead, we looked at if we liked them when they bloomed. When I grew up and moved away, I realized I had a pretty comprehensive native plant education just living on my short little street. My mother’s favorite plant was Queen-of-the-Prairie (Filipendularubra) and her front yard was one lovely sea of pink. She had many woodland varieties of shade plants. We hunted morel mushrooms. We incessantly bird watched and did Audubon bird counts. We were constantly part of nature and outside.
All this plant and animal information was available for a little kid to learn, or at least absorb. We did many family garden walks, which continued to increase my plant knowledge. Grandma came to visit, and we did the Garden Walk. When we visited Grandma, the visit started with the Garden Walk. We visited my mother’s sister. Yup, we got out of the car and proceeded to the Garden Walk.
Fast forward to finishing college, getting married, having children, getting them settled in their adult lives – all things that took a lot of my attention. Finally, I had time and I joined a garden club. It turned out I knew a lot about plants, native and otherwise. I soon realized I was developing a passion for native plants, garden design, wildlife and teaching all of that to others.
In 1975, my husband and I moved to a 1-acre lot with a giant hickory tree, a huge wild cherry tree, and a beautiful woodland area of native hawthorns trees. Our big tree subdivision was just being developed. I watched as beautiful spring flowers – Jacob’s ladder (Polemonium reptans), Virginia bluebells (Mertensia virginica), trilliums (Trillium), prairie phlox (Phlox pilosa), wild geranium (Geranium maculatum), Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema triphyllum), Dutchman’s breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) and many more – were all were being bull dozed away. What to do? Well, bring them home to my yard, of course. I would go into lots that had been staked for development and helped myself. No one cared. I bought plants to add to my collection — and soon I had seven pages of native plants on my property.
The people who built our house loved putting white landscaping rock around the bases of all the trees. What to do? I got my grass guy to start saving me bags of leaves from his mulching mower, and I threw them, as well as chopped leaves from the neighbors, on the gravel. Today all of my woodland plants grow in soil I’ve created. So if I buy a gallon-sized plant, I must dig down through the soil I’ve created, through the gravel, then landscaping plastic, then sometimes more gravel and more plastic, before I finally get to God’s good earth to plant it.
Covering all the gravel really dictated the design of the yard and that is what makes it look a little planned yet so very natural. I’ve also learned that having edges on your beds makes the beds look tidy and that no one will notice the little wilder, weedy look in the middle. I do my own hand weeding and know it’s easier to pull out things like tree sprouts after a good rain.
I started showing my yard to groups to educate them about what you need to do to garden for wildlife. I specialize in Girl Scout troops getting their gardening badges. I host garden clubs and home schoolers. Everyone goes home with milkweed seeds and information.
I wanted to live in a suburban yard that emulated native woods. So I dug trees out of vacant lots (Always try to get permission first): walnut, catalpa, tulip, Osage orange, and my new favorites, pawpaws (Asimina triloba) and American persimmon (Diospyros virginiana). Somewhere along the line I joined Wild Ones. Loved the group. Loved the name.
And I continued to add native perennials with a fury. My tours got more and more expansive. In fact, I had to quit listing my plants for visitors because it took too much paper. Instead, I used yard signs to educate people about the plants. Wild Ones, National Wildlife, Illinois Audubon, Monarch Watch, The Conservation Foundation, and Leave That Trunk For Wildlife certified my yard. I was queen of dead tree advocates since we had redheaded woodpeckers in the neighborhood and I wanted to keep them.
I also had to design my yard and garden so it didn’t look like a wild field and so I could keep my neighbors happy. I do have groomed areas in my yard, as well as some nonnatives. Du Page Wild Ones members have toured my yard and there might have been some snickering at my tree peonies, but you have to remember that right underneath the tree peonies are nodding onions (Allium cernuum) and prairie smoke (Geum triflorum) with prairie dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis) and little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) not far from my mom’s 70-year-old Jackmani clematis and her Queen-of-the-Prairie.
One year I embraced Moon Gardening — everything was white. I designed a natural pond with a liner and no filter that encompassed the entire front yard. The occasional great blue heron would visit, as well as a plethora of frogs and a pair of mallard ducks. Now one of my featured gardens is a fairy/moss garden with lots of conifers and moss.
My big focus today is butterfly gardening. In my yard, I have spicebush (Lindera benzoin) for spicebush swallowtails, a tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) for tiger swallowtails and pawpaw trees (Asimina triloba) for zebra swallowtails. You’ll also find pussy-toes (Antennaria dioica) for American painted lady butterflies and Dutchman’s pipe (Aristolochia tomentosa) for pipevine swallowtail caterpillars. We’ve only had Dutchman’s pipe caterpillars once and they are a riot since they are the ugliest critter on Earth. In addition, I have dill, fennel and curly parsley edging my borders for black swallowtails. I also like purple cabbage in my borders forweird plant selection, but the cabbage butterflies prefer white cabbage.
For people new to native landscaping, one of the best ways to get lots of free woodland plants is to go to a new subdivision under development and ask if you can help yourself. It takes a little nerve, but the lots will be cleared of these plants eventually, so why not make a rescue? And so it begins!
About the Yard
- The MacNeil’s 1-acre property backs up to a golf course in Frankfort, Illinois, south of Chicago.
- The front yard includes a natural, unfiltered pond with a liner, where goldfish control mosquitoes and where hybrid and native water lilies thrive. A brick wall that shields the pond from public view has prairie dropseed on one side and Kay’s mother’s favorite, Queen-of-the-prairie, as well as coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, little bluestem and milkweeds.
- A variety of trees line the property, including linden, cannonball Osage orange, wild plum, wild cherry, dogwood and others.
- The property is also home to some heirloom plants, such as orange poppies and a Japanese peony from Kay’s grandmother, as well as elderberry, spiderwort, cardinal flower, phlox, blazing star and others.
- In the back of the home is a rock garden with turk’s cap lilies, carrion ball vine and ferns from Kay’s grandmother.
Written by Kay MacNeil