This year, in the annual Great Gardens Contest conducted by the St. Louis Post Dispatch for its readership area, Banti and I were awarded the top prize in the amateur home gardens category for our tall-grass prairie and ornamental garden. It is a popular contest and is supported by most of the major nurseries, a local TV station and the Missouri Botanical Gardens, a highly regarded, internationally known institution. The top prize also came with merchandise coupons for $1,000 from various businesses involved with gardening and a laser-cut iron plaque by a local St. Louis artist. The judges especially commended our almost two acres of prairie, filled with native grasses and over fifty, colorful native flowering plants. It draws flocks of goldfinch, indigo-buntings, cardinals, blue-birds and is home to land turtles, rabbits, at least four kinds of non-venomous snakes and is a feeding/hunting ground for whitetailed deer, wild turkey, red and grey-foxes, coyotes and groundhogs.
The benefits of a native plants garden are many, not the least of which are the absence of the need to mow, to irrigate or fertilize or the need to use chemical herbicides and insecticides.
I have always been an ardent lover of the natural environment. It is something that grew out of my connections to my surroundings in rural upper-Assam, where our lives and livelihoods were deeply intertwined with nature's bounties and raising a kitchen garden was an integral part of growing up. The gardening interests and love of nature developed further into a passion for integrating landscaping into architecture, my profession, in creating a desirable environment for living and working. It is an extension of this that led to our involvement in creating a tall-grass prairie front yard and a perennial ornamental garden along with a substantial vegetable patch around our home that we built in this semi-rural north St. Louis county suburb about five years back. I read about and held a fascination for the great American prairie, where the buffalo once roamed and which many native Americans once called home, ever since my school days in Assam. So, when in recent decades, the movement for restoration of the destroyed prairies picked up steam in the Midwest, it was natural for me to jump right into it. The fascinating prairie that Missouri Botanical Gardens created at nearby Grey's Summit and the beautiful patches of native grasses that the neighboring Illinois Highway department has planted along many of its rights-ofway added inspiration. I did a lot of reading, and our new homestead with some of acreage fit well with my long held desire to establish our very own tall-grass prairie. It was a physically challenging task. Took three years to take hold, but once established it has been a joy to watch and live around.
By Chandan Mahanta
Missouri
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