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Natives in fall

The Plains Garden

The Plains Garden

The benefits of growing native plants are many – they are easy to grow, they increase native biodiversity, they reduce the risk of introducing invasives, and they use little water to name a few. In fall though, probably more than any other time of year, the overriding reason is their beauty.

It is easy to be jealous of Panayoti experiencing the South African spring right now however a walk around the gardens makes me see how much he is missing right here.
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Strange things end up on my desk…

Dodder growing on cleome.

And I love them all, truly I do. Even the parasitic ones that, left unchecked, would eventually take over our beloved Plains Garden. I am fascinated by all the weird extremes of natural selection- slime molds, corn smuts, flowers that smell like carrion and parasitic plants all find their way to me. My friends in horticulture know that in college I studied plants much like this particular weirdo- the parasitic plant dodder (Cuscuta sp.).

I’m sorry the picture doesn’t convey its incredibly insidious destructive nature… it’s curled around the stem of one of our favorite natives, a Rocky Mountain beeplant. The dodder started its life as
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