I was thinking Doronicum too but didn't know whether it would would growing out in the woods. Also 1 1/2 inches seems a little small for the flowers but I've only seen it in gardens where it's well fed.

bahia - thank you for your many wonderful suggestions, I will research all of them. The 'Charles Grimaldi' is beautiful and just the size I'm looking for. I might limb it up even more to form a more umbrella-like canopy for a more see-through structure. I'm also considering a large Schefflera tree like the one we have in a similar spot elsewhere in our backyard. It doesn't flower (at least not yet). It did have some black leaves when our winter temps dipped to 26 degrees one year, but recovered nicely.

I guess you'd have to be in my shoes to see the damage-yes, damage-done by this obsession with prairies as "the" native vegetation, all while forests continue to be converted to parking lots and car washes ad nauseum. It's well beyond the time I've got right now-I'm smack in the middle of doing data gathering for Wetland Mitigation Monitoring Reports for our DNR and the Army Corps of Engineers-in sites which are prairie plantings no less, to fully flesh this out. I've taken shots at it here and there on the various native-oriented forums here on GW. We're talking highly nuanced, but most people just want to receive a very simple message that if they cut down the blue spruce and plant some Rudbeckias in their yards, they've done great things for nature. I dare say, I think you'd be surprised if you knew the full extent of my personal and professional involvement in this area. And BTW, as vegetation manager for our many Stormwater utility sites and projects, I am directly involved in the installation and maintenance of prairie plantings.....not restorations...but which I do in fact view as little oases of habitat for those organisms which do best there. However, due to our location right in the middle of said tension zone, I've devoted considerable effort to educating my associates as to just exactly what vegetation communities are truly native here. We've therefore expanded the total plant palette we use at such sites. You'd be extremely hard-pressed to convince me this has not been an important and positive contribution. What has happened, again due to what I call the prairie lobby, is that because the basic methodology of prairie formation/maintenance is that these were pyric plant communities, now everyone thinks all the land around here burned every three years, or some equivalent bit of nonsense. In fact, the county I live in was originally covered by primarily northern hardwood forest, which indeed does burn sometimes, but research has shown the fire interval to be roughly 400 years! I decry the simple-minded way that so many avowed native enthusiasts view plant community management, due to the unwarranted intrusion of this kind of thinking into every corner of the discipline. Pyric plant communities are great, they did exist in this state, but they are far, far from the whole story. And this unwarranted simplification does a disservice to nature at large. I've literally been standing in the middle of one of our created prairies with one of the big guys, the acknowledged experts, in the field of native restoration, as they wondered if this strain of big bluestem, or that patch of switchgrass, was genetically appropriate for our locale,while during the whole time, an adjacent tract of forest was being torn down for more houses....with not a word or so much as a thought given to the utterly wanton destruction going on next door, so to speak. This rubs me the wrong way, to say the very least. +oM

Hi, kimmsr, Thanks so much for replying. I got a soil test in 2012, but I've added some organic matter since then. The pH was 7.7; the organic matter was 3.2%. When I dig a hole to plant a tree and fill it with water, it drains at what I imagine to be an average rate. I can't remember exactly, but it didn't seem super fast or slow, I think a hour or two to empty. It holds water pretty normally too. If I water 1 to 1.5 hours one morning, the next day the very top of the soil looks bone dry, but just underneath or within a half inch there's plenty of moisture. There seems to be an earthworm under almost every weed I dig up. Once the lupines get going there are bees everywhere, and I see ladybugs, ground beetles, and little spiders every so often. The soil smells great, in my opinion. It's good-looking soil, nice and black when wet, with a good texture, not too crumbly or too sticky. A layer of reddish-brown clay becomes prominent about 10 to 12 inches down. I haven't noticed hardpan. In the soil test, nutrients were (in ppm): nitrate-N 8, phosphorus 45, potassium 167, magnesium 294, calcium 2099, sodium 25. Soluble salts 0.2 mmhos/cm. Per their recommendations, I added elemental sulfur to the vegetable garden, but I haven't amended the flower beds. By the way, there's an underground irrigation system, and I just paid a guy to come out and replace the heads along the fence with "shrub heads" 16 inches tall and move some of them closer to the fence. Thanks This post was edited by myrmayde on Thu, Jul 24, 14 at 14:30