The natives are restless

Needle-leaved navarretia (Navarretia intertexta), blooming this afternoon.

I have been clobbered by an evil stomach bug that has lingered now for four days, but I finally felt up for a little walk, and I wanted to check on a patch of small white flowers on sort of spiny stalks, just a couple of inches tall at most.  They've shown up elsewhere, and when these sweet furry green things became sorta sharp brown things, I assumed they must be evil.

When I saw them again this year in a spot in the second-year prairie, I had recognized that native annuals (like the previously-mentioned Midget phlox) were showing up in this area.  I thought that I had better identify everything, so I can walk through in the next week and pull the stray Prickly lettuce and mustard (thankfully, there is much less of this as the years go by).  They do have sweet tiny flowers, and before they become little sticker things, they make a lovely little patch like this...

And, sure enough, consulting my Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest (Turner and Gustafson), there it is on p. 161.  It looks like it will provide some needed competition to all of that Epilobium you can see sprouting around it.  We'll see how this goes, but my theory is that these annuals fill in and provide cover for the perennials that are coming up everywhere.  There's actually quite a bit of native grass species throughout, but they are still only little green threads.  After the perennials mature, these annuals remain ready to take advantage of any opportunity.  Now they're getting an unusual opportunity and I hope they behave themselves, but I think it is just this sort of biomass that creates an actual prairie as it composts.   

And here's a shot of clarkia and Oregon sunshine in all its glory as I walked back to the house...

Late Spring bloom...

Oregon sunshine, clarkia, Wyeth buckwheat, and yarrow blooming in the prairie today...

These images are all from my "second-year" prairie, the areas that I planted 18 months ago with the Palouse Conservation District grant.  There are some plants in this area that have been here for awhile--the Arrowleaf balsamroot (past blooming now, but you can see the large leaves on the right side of the photo) is fifteen years old--but most of this area was replanted with natives when I received the PCD grant.  This area is where I took the previous post's images of Midget phlox, which I didn't plant, but it was somehow inspired to show up here.  It is still blooming, but you can't really see it in this image--they really are tiny flowers.

One of the great successes of the PCD replanting was Taper-leaved penstemon (below), which I think is spectacularly beautiful.  This one blooming here was planted as a plant in a pot (from the Idaho Native Plant Society sale last year), but I also purchased a bunch of seed and there are many, many penstemon sprouts all over the place on the property now.  I am really looking forward to seeing drifts of this fabulous flower in the future!

One of the plants that I planted in this area years ago was this Gaillardia aristata, which has now grown into a substantial clump.  This is a plant that you can buy in a lot of nurseries--supposedly it is the same species--but the cultivar generally has redder petals.  I think the local native version is more beautiful.  The seeds for this one came from a population that grows a mile east of here.

I have to go through this entire area to pull seed heads off of cheatgrass and other annual grass species, but it is basically finished, as far as substantial planting is concerned...