Growing native prairie grasses may help push them off endangered species list
By Erica Simmonds
The grass grew four feet tall in Ann Gerry’s garden, but that’s just the way she likes it. Three years ago, Gerry pulled out most of her Kentucky bluegrass (what most lawns consist of) and planted native prairie grasses and flowers in its place. “It looked beautiful,” says Gerry, a terrestrial ecologist with Saskatchewan Environment and board member of the Native Plant Society of Saskatchewan, who lives in Lumsden, just outside of Regina. “But I’m sure some of my neighbours were puzzled.”
Native prairie grasses are endangered, so growing them contributes to their conservation – what Garth Wruck, coordinator of the Native Plant Society and plant ecologist, calls “backyard conservation.” Wruck says native grasses are symbolic of Canadian culture and heritage. “There is a historical link, since they are plants that were here before the Europeans.”
But native grasses are not readily available to gardeners. To find the seeds, Wruck advises contacting a conservation organization or searching on the Internet. “There’s a huge demand for [native grasses] from the public. It’s such a new thing that the garden centres and greenhouses have kind of avoided it,” he says.
Gardeners may be disinclined to plant native grasses because many are shabby and weed-like, says Peter Odynski, a horticulturist at the Devonian Botanic Garden at the University of Alberta. Rice and June grasses are among some of the nicer ones, he says, but “generally, grasses don’t show much interest to your average gardener,” adding, “Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” One of Gerry’s favourites is the blue grama grass: “It’s a shorter grass, but the leaves are curly and the flowering head looks like a curling eyelash.”
Wruck’s organization is trying to educate people within the horticulture industry about mass-producing native grasses. The grasses require less work because they have adapted to the local climate after growing in the wild for thousands of years. Gerry watered her grasses the first year but found that she only needed to water them once the second year. Gardening with native grasses, however, requires patience. They haven’t been bred for constant
germination, Wruck says, and a gardener might have to wait up to three years for seeds to sprout.
Gardening with native grasses is also good for the environment, says Gerry, as gardeners don’t have to worry about introducing exotic species to their regions. Wruck says a lot of the weed problems we have come from invasive European plants, such as purple loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria). This former garden plant has now replaced native – and some endangered – plants in the wild. As a result, the Canadian government approved the release of thousands of beetles that eat purple loosestrife to help eradicate the problem.
While native grasses grow in most parts of Canada, they are the dominant vegetation in the prairies. There are about 70 types, including one to three COSEWIC (Committee on the Status on Endangered Wildlife in Canada) species that are considered at risk. Of the three types of prairie grasses, only a fraction one percent of tall-grass prairies remain, less than 24 percent of mixed-grass prairies are intact, and less than five percent of the fescue prairie grasses.
As for Gerry, she recently moved and is trying to decide what species of grasses to plant in her new garden. The four-foot grasses she had so much satisfaction watching grow are in someone else’s hands now.
