Thank you for the tour! I'm looking forward to watching this thread as in previous years.

Hi Woods Tea, its been a while since I posted. Your HS is looking really good, much more interesting than when it was mostly grasses, I bet you are glad the perennials are finally gaining some size. Looks quite nice. I wonder if your neighbors are inspired? No one in my neighborhood has chosen to 'imitate' mine but people do walk by and say they enjoy it. It seems to be a good conversation starter when I'm out there putzing about and people are walking down to the park, usually with their dogs.

I have one Lead Plant (in the backyard) that I started from a good sized rooted portion dug up at a farm up in Kansas and its a very slow grower. Three years and its about 2ft tall & wide but still just a single stem. Since mine wasn't grown from seed or a purchased seedling so it is woody at the base (like a shrub) and stands upright and I imagine yours will too once it gets more mature, too much water or not. They are a bit brittle and break easily -- mine is by the hose hook-up so it gets a hit from the tangled hose sometimes.

There is not much new news from my HS----After such an unusually warm late winter and very early spring (temps in the 80's and even 90's) followed by a severe cooling off and lots of rain (finally!) I discovered yesterday that my Azure Sage is getting ready to bloom-- its covered in buds, its a late fall bloomer and I've never had that happen before. Other than that, my HS is pretty much the same except I have more Little BS grasses since my last posted pictures and that 'Thin Man' Indian Grass is doubled in size, can't wait to see it come fall down in the corner of the HS by the driveway.

Weirdly, I have a couple Little Bluestem plants putting up blooms while others are just now coming out of dormancy. I am suspecting I have damage from june bug grubs on some of my grasses.

I haven't taken any pictures this season. Right now we are well watered and things look good but who knows what kind of summer it will be. Currently we are out of the drought (I heard it on the News yesterday), at least for now that is.

On the down side, I had a lot of winter-kill both in front and back. I think that early week of very cold hit us before things were hardened off. I lost some hardy stuff that surprised me while others (listed zone 8) that are not so hardy did just fine. I lost nearly all of my 'Prairie Fire' carex plants in the mass planting in the courtyard, usually its evergreen in winter.

Looks good, WoodsTea!

Sorry to hear about your Carex 'Prairie Fire', I know those were some of your favorites. When I hear about things like that it makes me second guess putting less hardy (or in one way or another less tough) plants into the hell strip. Originally I wanted things that could handle a fairly serious drought, but lately I've added some things that like more mesic soil, like Amsonia 'Blue Ice'. Here it is with Sesleria autumnalis along the sidewalk:

The last few years haven't been too bad for us weather-wise, so I haven't had too much trouble. I'm not sure what I'll do when we have serious drought. The Sesleria didn't look too great last year, but it was planted fairly late in the spring. This year it's starting to fill in a little more. I'm hoping it will eventually fill in most of the bare space around it. I'd plant more of it, but it's expensive and not available locally as far as I know. I go back and forth about whether to order more now or just wait another year or two and divide it.

I liked the look of the Echinacea simulata (glade coneflower) today, particularly those dark stems:

I just love the variety of textures and seasonal variation displayed. I wish all gardeners could see the value of variety and seasonal progression. And get rid of lawn!!!!

We had a big storm last night and a lot of things are looking ragged, like this Indian pink (Spigelia marilandica):

I expect it to prop back up on its own, but this pale purple coneflower (Echinacea pallida) probably won't without staking:

This particular coneflower plant gets blown over every spring, while another farther down the strip leans a bit, but stays reasonably upright. One of these days I'll pull this one out. I'm reluctant though because I took one of my favorite pictures of that plant a couple of years ago, the morning after a rain:

In the corner by the street is a Missouri evening primrose (Oenothera macrocarpa) that I transplanted from another location. It was never part of the original design but seems to like the spot. It is especially lovely -- almost glowing -- on moonlit nights when we head out to take the dog for a walk. Unfortunately it doesn't look too great during the day, and the lemony yellow color clashes with the more orange-yellow of the lanceleaf coreopsis I'm using as a filler plant.

This corner is where I put the trash and recycling on Thursday mornings. The plastic recycling bin often gets flung back haphazardly into the hell strip, so this primrose and the plants around it get beaten up a bit. The primrose might get taken out eventually. More stone and low plants like the prairie pussytoes at lower left would probably be better.

I had a question about Spigelia marilandica, Indian Pink, so I thought I'd post a couple of pictures from this morning. This first one is the closest to the sidewalk. I think it's a frequent dog target, but seems to be doing fine:

Here's another that's having some foliage trouble:

I haven't taken the time to try and pin down what the problem is, but I've seen something like this the last couple of years on one or more plants. Mostly I notice that the foliage looks a little yellower and a bit crumply, though the flowering seems to be fine.

I like these plants a lot but they're probably not in the best location, since it gets pretty dry out there. I'd imagine it helps that I dug a lot of compost into that bed when I was first preparing it some years ago. Mostly I wish I hadn't done that because the prairie plants in the sunnier end of the strip would probably perform better (less floppiness) with leaner soil.

It kills me to see that plant growing in a hellstrip!!! I have planted it at least 3 times in enriched soil in light shaded woodlands. It never even grew enough to die. It faded away. three times. Wonder what the trick is.

I agree Marie.....impressive the they look so healthy in a "Hell Strip" (WoodsTea you definitely have a green thumb).

(WT are those pictures current ie the "Spigelia" in bloom right now?! My two are probably 3 inches high right now and wont bloom until July)

With our two reliable 'returners' I am considering adding more or moving either of the two to a more prominent position in the garden.

Yes, I took those shots this morning. Looking back at my pictures the last three years, they usually bloom at some point in late May.

I got all of these plants as seedlings from a native plants nursery a couple of hours east of here. I've had great results with most things I've purchased there. I suspect there's an advantage in planting native things that are sourced from your local area, but whether that has anything to do with these Spigelia doing well I can't say. I think the Spigelia were in quart-sized containers when I purchased them.

This bed had a lot of prep before I planted anything. The soil is a mollisol, typical of the prairies around here - lots of silt in it. I tilled in (fairly shallowly) 2-3 inches of compost, then planted a summer buckwheat crop, followed by a rye/vetch/radish cover crop mix over the winter. I think this probably improved drainage a bit plus added organic matter to the soil.

Here you can see the first ones I planted, in early May of 2014, surrounded by native sedges:

The straw is the residue from the rye and vetch, which I left on the ground as a mulch. I had a lot more free time back then.

Current state of the hell strip this evening after some maintenance. The Salvia in the middle is 'Pink Friesland'. I put some of it as well as the 'May Night' on the right side as a test to see if I liked the form and color of either. I'm pretty happy with the 'Pink Friesland', will probably put more of that in and move the 'May Night' elsewhere.

Thanks to WoodsTea for bringing this thread to my attention. Here's my parking strip garden, installed last month. It's the first 24 feet of what will hopefully be my entire 200' x 4.75' parking strip conversion.

View from the driveway:

From the middle of the bed, looking left:

And middle, looking right:

Plants included are:

Agastache "Blue Boa"

Asclepias asperula (antelope horns milkweed)

Asclepias viridis (green antelopehorns milkweed)

Artemisia "Powis Castle"

Baptisia australis v. minor (dwarf false indigo)

Callirhoe involucrata (winecup)

Lavandula 'Goodwin Creek Grey' (Goodwin Creek lavender)

Nepeta "Walker's Low" (Walker's Low catmint)

Phyla nodiflora (frogfruit)

annual Gomphrena globosa "Buddy Purple"

Eventually, I'll replace the Gomphrena with grasses: little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), blue grama (Bouteloua gracilis), and Ruby crystals grass (Melinus nerviglumis).

I'm planting this from the perspective as seen from my house--taller plants towards the street, shorter plants near the sidewalk. Soil is unamended Blackland Prairie clay. I did mix in several handfuls of compost and expanded shale into the backfill when I installed each of the plants, though.

Ugh, I so want to flip my strip. I have the whole thing planned out. About 30% small rocks, then some landscape roses like the drift series, Russian sage, etc. maybe I can tackle that project next year. First though, I have to seek HOA approval which is iffy given how strict they are. Hell strips with grass are so stupid here, seeing as how I live in what's basically the high desert.

Looking good, Lindon. I never thought to use annuals while the bed was young, but that's partly because my original concept was to have mostly prairie dropseed, which filled in pretty quickly. I had some blue grama (from seed) out in that strip originally, but it grew long and flopped terribly -- probably too wet and too rich a soil for it here.

Several blocks down the street from me is another homeowner that's doing a lot of native stuff. His strip, narrower than mine, had a mix of things including columbine and winecups, but the winecups have now filled the entire strip. It'll be interesting to see how yours interact with the other species. I'm sure the Baptisia will hold its own, but I'm not familiar with most of your other plants.

I'm curious about your soil, reesepbuttercup. There are so many western plants that I'd love to put into my gardens, but they'd never make it here with all the rain and the silty clay loam soil. I would think it would be much easier to find good hell strip plants out there -- lots of low-growing, drought tolerant things to choose from.

The gomphrena were unintentional. I'd drawn a layout, killed the turf in the strip, bought the perennials, bought seeds for the grasses. Then I learned that native grasses are slow growers--that they'd take several months to grow up to plug size. Oops.

Anyway, I now needed something for the blank spaces while my grasses matured. Buying a flat of annuals seemed the easiest thing to do. In the meantime, I've got seed trays of little bluestem and blue grama growing on my patio.

It's interesting how plants behave in different climates. Winecups, here, are considered "friendly natives" that play well with others. I'm more worried about the catmint. It's supposed to be a bit of a spreader. I've kept it to the outside edge of the bed just in case.

Agastache and Artemisia are known to suddenly die after a few years. But watching the garden evolve is all part of the fun!

I had a similar experience, having originally intended to grow everything from seed. Once I learned that starting prairie dropseed that way would set me back at least a year, I went and bought a bunch of plugs (or perhaps slightly larger than plugs usually are) from a native nursery. It cost me quite a bit to do it, well over $200 if I remember correctly for the dropseed and also the sedges for the shadier end. I applaud your patience!

Today, a nice man from the city told me that they'll be tearing up about 1/3 of my hellstrip garden to work on the gas lines. Yay!

I guess now would be a good time to post a mid-season update. It has only been a month since the last time I posted photos, and I can't believe how much the garden has filled in.

From the driveway:

The frogfuit is really going gangbusters. I cut back the frogfruit on the curb side just before taking this picture. Otherwise, the curb would be completely hidden by the leaves. On the sidewalk side, I cut back the frogfruit about two weeks ago, and it definitely needs another haircut.

From the middle of the bed looking left (everything here is in the demolition zone):

From the middle of the bed, looking right:

Love reading and seeing updates!

Wow, that's really filled in since your last post, and looking great! Last spring I had a city crew show up with heavy equipment and I was afraid they were going to tear into my strip. It turned out that they were digging out a big section of the next door neighbor's strip in order to replace a leaky section of pipe that was causing a small sinkhole (and rat habitat) there. They trampled some of my plants, but it was nothing too serious.

I've known that this could happen at any moment. When it does I hope I'll have enough time to move some things beforehand. What will bum me out more than anything isn't the plants, but rather the loss of soil structure and all the root systems that are developing, perhaps many feet down.

I'm going to attempt to dig up the plants in the demolition zone. I'll probably move those plants into planters while road work is going on and then put them back in the ground afterwards.

I'm upset because I have milkweed and baptisia in that section, and I've been told that they don't transplant well, and I'm afraid they won't survive. They weren't easy to find, and I haven't even seen either of them bloom!

Milkweed (Asclepias asperula) is in the white box, Baptisia australis v. minor is in the red oval.

The only good thing I can say about the news is that I was thinking about moving the frogfruit, anyway, since it is so aggressive, but I guess that decision has been made for me.

At least your Baptisia and milkweed are still pretty small, so hopefully it won't be too hard to dig down and get most of the taproot. I don't think my Baptisia australis var. minor plants bloomed until the third year.

I took these yesterday. I planted a pack of wildflowers about 15 years

Beautiful strip there, andreap! I love the lower plants along the pavement -- I need more of that kind of thing to balance out some of my taller plants.

Here's an early July update on my strip. It's mostly green at this time of year now that the butterflyweed and echinaceas have faded. There is some pink fame flower (Phemeranthus calycinus, formerly Talinum calycinum) along the edges, and the white blooms of wild quinine (Parthenium integrifolium) just keep on keeping on since they started to bloom back in May:

I've been very pleased with the texture and color of those two clusters (the nearer one is just behind the white wild quinine) of Vernonia lettermannii 'Iron Butterfly'. Roy Diblik described the foliage as "dark green", which didn't seem to fit the photos I'd seen of it. The older foliage really is dark green though, it's just that the new growth on top is much lighter.

I've also got a few spikes of false aloe (Manfreda virginica) in bloom. A couple of the stalks are 5 feet tall, but it's so slender that there's no problem with visibility. As it expands and sends up more stems in future years, it might become a problem, but not so far. My girlfriend loves the scent of the flowers, says it's somewhat clove-y, though my less sensitive nose doesn't pick up on that:

Some sideoats grama has popped up in the strip, a child of some earlier ones I pulled because I thought the grass was too loose looking, but that was when there was more space between plants. I think it looks better now that the garden has filled in. Here it is in front of the switchgrass cultivar 'Cheyenne Sky':

I thought I'd add one photo from last month since I missed doing an update then. Here's lead plant (Amorpha cancescens) with butterflyweed and prairie dropseed in the background, taken on June 12:

Thanks, WoodsTea. I lined the curb with rocks from the back yard and planted moss phlox, creeping jenny, lemon thyme, and low-growing sedums there. I also love hens and chicks (sempervivum) but have to keep pulling away the other plants from them. I consider them all living mulch and never water or fertilize them. They keep spreading to the middle but I only pull them when I want to plant something new like annuals.

Lindon, IIRC, the problem with milkweed transplant is that they form a long taproot. If correct, then your best hope may be to plan on digging deep.

Q, OoC, for all of you hell strippers (hmm, kinda amusing when said that way ... heh), how much of a problem do you or others you know have with idiots letting their dogs use the strip as their public toilet or with jerks stealing your plants? I know stuff like that can happen with garden areas in one's yard and there are many people who would consider a strip to be "public domain."

Good questions. It depends so much on the neighborhood. Ours is pretty good in terms of people picking up after dogs. I rarely, maybe once a year, find a gift left by a dog in the strip, though a lot of dogs stop to raise a leg there. It doesn't seem like my plants have suffered because of it. Our own dog often heads straight for the closest Indian pink in that strip as we start off on a walk, and it looks fine. Dense planting might help discourage owners from letting their dogs get in there. I know it does when I'm walking a dog.

My thinking is that the better you can make your strip look, the less people will treat it with disrespect -- and vice versa. As mine looks messier toward the end of the year, I start to find more trash thrown from cars. Because of that I do more raking and more cutting back than I would otherwise.

So far I've never had anyone steal a plant from the strip. They'd have a hard time digging out some of the established natives. I wonder if this might be more likely if I had a more sparsely planted, mulched strip with flashier flowers.

I had pots of flowers stolen a couple years ago, so I no longer set out flashy flower containers to fill in gaps as I used to. Haven't had problems with dogs, as the bed is several inches above the street (I lined the curb with rocks to raise the bed).

My installation is quite recent, but I haven't had problems with dogs in the strip, either. I do occasionally find "gifts" in my yard, though.

Lots of scavengers/scrappers come through our neighborhood, so I would not leave anything in the strip that wasn't planted in the ground. Once, when I was mowing, the mower ran out of gas on the hellstrip. I left the mower and walked to the garage to get the gas can, and when I came back, a man had gotten out of his car and was looking the mower over!

Mid-August update. Prairie dropseed seed haze starting to form now, and the ironweed (Vernonia lettermannii 'Iron Butterfly') is flowering.

In the front corner Missouri evening primrose is back in flower again -- I think this might be the third wave of bloom this summer -- and prairie pussytoes continues to fill in to the left:

There are times when the evening primrose looks scraggly and I think about pulling it (see above), but with some deadheading and occasional pruning, it bounces back. For now I'm going to keep it, and perhaps even divide it so I can have a clump or two farther down the strip, replacing some of the prairie dropseed that works better away from the edges.

We had about 6 inches of rain here last night in a short period of time. We're closing in on 10 inches above normal since Jan 1. That's caused some problems for plants in the strip that prefer it drier, like this prairie dropseed:

What a mess. The stems are a good five feet long.

I'm going to be pulling a bunch of the prairie dropseed out again this year, so that the only ones left are toward the center of the strip where the floppiness isn't as much of a problem.

The strip is long overdue for some cleanup. I really need to get out there.

Probably the last photo for 2017. Here's the strip on November 12. I pulled out some more prairie dropseed and two more Baptisia that I thought were badly placed too near the sidewalk. I added a number of lower things along the sidewalk and drive -- more Sesleria autumnalis, more Antennaria neglecta, plus a few other perennials on a trial basis. More to say about that in the spring.

You can see that I've cut back the prairie dropseed again. I'm hoping that eventually I won't have to do that. I will probably remove a few more next year, and then I think I may be able to leave the remaining ones alone in the fall.

You have a good range of color and texture, even now. So much more interesting than the other tree lawns in the background. Are the plants fine with the leaves on the bed for the winter or do you need to remove leaves from a few of the low-growing plants such as the Antennaria?

I rake at least some of them. Partly that's for appearance. I find trash thrown from vehicles sometimes in the strip and my perception is that it happens more often the more unkempt the strip looks, though that could be my imagination.

Aside from that it depends on the winter. It's a plowed street so the strip can get loaded down with quite a bit of snow some years. I try to keep an eye on it so I don't get a situation with matted down wet layers suffocating things. In dry winters I'd rather have the leaf cover.

Your Hell Strip is so verdant and lucious. I always want to add something but I don't have a hell strip.... Well I do have things that border a dirt road . Does that count. It is hellishly hot and it does not get water.

wantonamara---- You qualify for 'hell' strip conditions, think of it as a real big strip with special challenges to boot.

Woodstea, if your strip is like mine, you can clean out the leaves but in two or three days it doesn't look any different than it did before you cleaned it a couple days ago. I usually clean mine several times in winter, its a good reason to get outside on warm days. Those oak leaves keep coming all winter.

I cleaned mine out yesterday (Thanksgiving) because we celebrated Thanksgiving today. People driving by probably felt sorry for me for spending Thanksgiving Day grubbing out leaves by hand into a bucket but I enjoyed it, it was gorgeous out. There were lots of those styrofoam packing peanut things among the leaves that had blown in, someone must have tossed a package and let them blow everywhere, a beer can and some bits of paper. I thinned out some stuff because it was looking somewhat overgrown and it looks much neater now (for a couple days). I need to get rid of Miss Huff Lantana so I cut it to the ground. It got way too big for the strip.

Hear is my one and only photo of my hellstrip for the year. Some palafoxia callosa and a stunted deer muhly.

Much better photo of the palafoxia than the washed out one I posted.

My hell strip has just as many leaves in it as it did the day before I cleaned it out which was two days ago. Who says neatness counts? Maybe I could get a giant fan and leave it blowing on high toward the street?

Or move to the other side of the street... Do you think it works that way?

Would never do that because I'd end up with a north exposure up front. For some reason, my yard collects more leaves than other people's on the block, wonder why that is? (blink blink)

LOL/.. That northern exposure is tough. I have that in my Cactus garden. Sunny in summer but some of it is in the long shadows of trees during the winter.

Two more photos from a late December afternoon. Along the sidewalk edge you can see sweet gum balls from the neighbor's tree. I think they make decent mulch so have left them where they are for now, though a bit of cleanup along the sidewalk is clearly overdue.

The dark clumps are Vernonia lettermanii 'Iron Butterfly'. Here's a closeup:

I love this color combo.

There's still a bit of green out in the strip, mostly in the Sesleria autumnalis and the sedges toward the far end. Honestly I'd be happier if all the green were gone by this time. There's something about weak green colors in winter I don't care for much. I like the bright straw color of my buffalo grass lawn much better than the neighbor's fading green fescue lawns, which I find a little depressing. But that's just me.

Who knows -- maybe some day I will find a short, well-behaved warm season grass to replace the Sesleria. For now it's hard to beat along the front edge of the strip during the growing season.

Happy New Year to all, see you then!