On Sunday, Judy and I met our son Daniel for lunch. Afterwards, we crossed the street to visit the 24-acre West Ridge Nature Preserve. Judy and I had been here in February last year, but there wasn’t much plant life to observe at the time. This was a chance to see what was going on mid-summer.
So Judy and I just raised our first Monarch butterflies to adulthood. We were nervous about trying, but then we read that only about 5% of Monarch caterpillars in the wild make it to adulthood. We figured we could do better than that.
Let’s continue our visit to Mettawa Manor, the garden of Bill Kurtis and Donna LaPietra. For me, the highlight of the trip was wandering through their 20-acre Tall Grass Prairie.
Today Judy and I visited Mettawa Manor, the garden of Bill Kurtis and Donna LaPietra, as part of the Garden Conservancy‘s Open Gardens Day. This was our second visit, as we had been there in early June for an event organized by the Lurie Garden. You can read about that first visit here.
In the fall of 2016, I planted 5 Hoary Vervain (Verbena hastata) in the Driveway Border. The following spring and throughout 2017, I continued to look for them, but to no avail. I assumed that they had wasted away to oblivion for some reason or another.
The other day got off to a fine start when I opened the front door to find that the my ‘Conca d’Or’ Lilies had bloomed.
There are certain plants that really define a garden at a given point in the season. This is certainly true of the Lurie Garden in July.
And this is what the Back Garden looks like in mid-July.
The Back Garden sits under the shade of Silver Maples and Siberian Elms, not everyone’s favorite trees, I know. But they give a high, dappled shade that I appreciate.
Changes in the garden accelerate as we reach mid-summer. Every few days seems to bring something new. Let’s take an overview of the state of the Front Garden.
An hour’s drive southwest of Chicago is an 18,000-acre prairie preserve called Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie (pronounced Mi-DAY-win). The preserve was created mostly out of lands that had belonged to the now-closed Joliet Army Ammunition Plant. Today the land is part of the U.S. Forest Service and is operated in partnership with the The Nature Conservancy and other groups. There is a large volunteer organization called the Midewin Alliance.
gardeninacity 