Author Archives: Chris Helzer

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About Chris Helzer

Chris Helzer is Director of Science and Stewardship for The Nature Conservancy in Nebraska, where he conducts research and supervises the Conservancy’s preserve stewardship program. He also helps develop, test, and share prairie management and restoration strategies. Chris is also dedicated to raising awareness about the value of prairies through his photography, writing and presentations. He is the author of The Prairie Ecologist blog, and two books: The Ecology and Management of Prairies and Hidden Prairie: Photographing Life in One Square Meter. He is also a frequent contributor to NEBRASKAland magazine and other publications. Chris and his family live in Aurora, Nebraska.

Hubbard Fellowship Blog – Planning a Prairie Garden

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A guest post by Anne Stine, one of our Hubbard Fellows:

It just recently turned cold out, which means I’ve started daydreaming about next year’s garden.  I am a native plant enthusiast, and I have decided that I’ll be planting a prairie garden filled with my favorite flowers that I’ve learned with The Nature Conservancy in Nebraska over the past six months.  I’ve poured through the internet searching for propagation information and bloom times.  I want to make sure I have a continuous bloom period, both because it makes for pleasant viewing and because I want to provide native bee habitat across the growing season.  I also need to know which seeds require stratification or scarification. Because I am me, I made a spreadsheet of all this information (at the bottom of this post).

Who wouldn't want flowers like this in a garden? Blue lobelia and cardinal flower in The Nature Conservancy's Platte River Prairies.

Who wouldn’t want flowers like this in a garden? Blue lobelia and cardinal flower in The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies.

Ultimately, I want my garden to be a great pollinator resource filled with unique native plants. If it attracts birds and butterflies too, that’s a huge plus. Lastly, if it’s going to survive my schedule, it needs to be low-maintenance.  I am pleased to note that gardening with native plants can fulfil all these objectives.  My table of appealing native plants, though not comprehensive, will help me design my garden to satisfy these requirements.  I’d love to hear everyone’s thoughts on favorite native plants and propagation tricks.

Happy plann(t)ing!

Click on the tables below to see a larger/clearer version of them.  Or click HERE to see the same information in a PDF format.

plantlist2

plantlist3

*Information on propagation, soil moisture requirements, and bloom period gathered from the USDA Plants Database, http://www.wildflower.org/plants Native Plant Database, and the Missouri Botanical Garden Plantfinder Database.

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Photo of the Week – December 5, 2013

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Continuing the theme from earlier this week, here is another photo of a sunflower seed head.  This one was taken on a frosty morning last week.

A sunflower seed head

A Maximilian sunflower seed head.  Deep Well Wildlife Management Area, Nebraska.

I usually try to avoid putting a horizon line behind the subject of a close-up photo because it can add unnecessary distraction to the image.  In this case, however, I tried the photo both ways and decided I liked the one with the horizon better because it gave the image some additional context and depth.

Here’s the alternate version – see what you think.

The same sunflower head shown above from a slightly different angle to keep the horizon line out of the image.

The same sunflower head shown above, but from a slightly different angle to keep the horizon line out of the image.