Part garden visit, part trespass

Back in 2012 I visited Ted's garden a few times, helping him to get his impressive bamboo grove under control. Ted moved later that year and this past weekend he invited me to see his "new" place and garden.

It was about 5PM when we arrived, the sun blazing into our faces from the west on this hot day, so I didn't take too many photos of the house, but I will on a future visit as it's architecturally significant. You can actually read an article about this Bernoudy house here.

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One of the reasons for Ted's invitation was to help him get some ideas for some of his nearly-empty planting areas:

Lots of shade, all ivy and euonymous right now, fairly clean but is too sparse for his tastes (and mine!)

He wants to add some of the shrubby and groundcover bamboos here. (Hence my involvement)

The house was built in the 1950's and the white gravel seen in some of these shots is probably original, true to the period. It's going to get a makeover soon.

Ted makes good use of containers...

...and has done a nice job in this sunny bed:

There are some nice artistic touches around too:

We were planning on heading over to my garden next, but rather than rush things we decided to push that visit to the coming weekend, giving us extra time for a little field trip...

...to the Litzinger Road Ecology Center. This is an educational center run by the Missouri Botanical Garden, and its main feature is an impressive prairie.

Technically we were trespassing here even though we took a shortcut so we didn't see the signage on the gate, but we scared away a few deer so we were helping, right?

(The angle of the sun was terrible for photos, so I ended up boosting contrast and saturation in all of these shots -- when you can't get it looking accurate, go artistic!)

There was lots of yellow here right now, the tall cup plants (Silphium perfoliatum) dominating (the plant in the above photo is not cup plant -- I'm not sure what it is)

So much insect life:

Look at the lady beetles going to work on the aphids!

The purple blooms are on what I think is iron weed but that's just a guess.

The big bluestem grasses Andropogon gerardii (or A. gerardi) were very tall -- 8-10' (2.4-3m) and so impressive:

I can't imagine what it would be like trudging through this stuff without mowed paths to follow!

I'm not sure if the white house is part of the center or if it's a private residence:

It's difficult to tell because this little pocket of wild is surrounded by unique houses of all sorts. It could just be that some lucky homeowner has a great view of a little prairie...


Glad we made the short walk over here -- as hot as it was -- because we usually have to drive out to Shaw Nature Reserve in order to get a taste of prairie.

Thanks for the visit Ted!

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