Christmas Greenery

Today I met David Hopey at the prairie and we did a bit of exploring and a lot of clearing brush. David is student at Penn State with an interest in restoration and wanted to get involved with the priarie at Big Hollow, so today he got involved. We cleared quite a bit of brush from three of the smaller prairie patches and David showed me two new patches I'd never seen. The new patches (new to me, at least) are a couple hundred yards from the main prairie. David discovered them this fall, after many of the rarer plants would have stopped flowering and would have been hard to find, so they remain unexplored. We will both be keeping an eye on them next summer to see which prairie plants are still holding on there.

Most of the plants in Big Hollow are now dormant and brown, but a few remain green. Of course the White Pines and Eastern Red Cedars are a cheery Christmas green, but joining them is a little wildflower that could easily be overlooked. Round-leaved Ragwort (Packera obovatus, formerly Senecio obovatus) forms large patches in the dry woods around the prairie, where it seems to favor steep slopes. In the spring it will produce golden-yellow flowers resembling small chyrsanthemums, but in December only rosettes of green leaves are visible. This seems like one of the more promising local natives for gardening; I bet it grows easily and it forms a nice-looking ground cover when it isn't blooming. Most of the web pages I found in a quick search describe the foliage as semi-evergreen, but at Big Hollow the leaves have made it all the way to December and still look fresh - I am guessing they will be green all year long.