It’s Spring! Plant a Boulevard Garden

Originally I wanted a dedicated rain garden, but the friendly folks at Capital Region Watershed District suggested it wouldn’t be an ideal location due to the mature trees. I loved the look of rock gardens, but I wanted to include more native plants, insect host plants, and pollinator plants. I also required plants that would be able to survive this rough environment without watering or significant nurturing from us. The U of MN Extension, it turns out, has the perfect reference material: The Best Plants for 30 Tough Sites, edited by Mary Meyer, Deborah L. Brown, and Mike Zins. They have recommendations for perennials and small trees for boulevard gardens, as well as a wealth of other advice on things like dry soil, river banks, shady areas, deer resistant plants.

With these constraints, I began planning a garden primarily composed of hardy native and pollinator perennials, with a bunch of my favorite yard rocks relocated to the boulevard.

There are many ways to start a garden from a patch of grass, including soil solarizing or smothering, both of which are fairly easy and require no special equipment or hard labor. However, I wanted to decrease the final height of the garden so that water would drain into it rather than run off into the street, so I had to get the grass removed instead. After calling Gopher State One to get the utility locations marked, I hired a neighbor who manually cut up and removed all the turf. He gave me some great advice on gardening, and he regularly stops by to chat about my garden as he’s out and about. Other neighbors stopped by to reuse the “sod” in their own yards or compost piles.

My partner Kyle and I began acquiring plants, starting in our own yard, and then in our neighborhood. I scattered some annual flower seeds  in the new garden, and then I picked out my perennials that needed dividing (including the ever-present sedum and hostas). We relocated some, and then took the rest to the Mac-Groveland Plant Share to exchange for other suitable plants, including a gorgeous pink phlox.  I asked my neighborhood’s Buy Nothing Project group if anyone had plants to share, and was gifted with some lovely lilies. A friend from work brought me irises he’d split from his garden, complete with labels and photo references of each type. After letting these plants establish themselves, I consulted my list and we went to Highland Nursery for some of the hardy natives I hadn’t yet found.

As the plants grew and bloomed, we often sat on the retaining wall and watched as they attracted bees and butterflies, even occasional birds. We put out a water bowl for the dogs. My sister brought me some nice big rocks to add to the not-yet-filled-in spots, and made me a series of seasonally-changing fairy garden decorations. Neighbors walking by stopped to chat about the garden, just as I’d been doing around the city. Planting the garden was, in many ways, a joint project with our community, and I am very thankful.

Later that fall, the city decided that one of our boulevard trees needed to be removed, as it had developed a deep split. It was sad to lose the tree, and also to lose some of the plants in that area as they ground out the stump. But it gave us the opportunity to plant a new tree, chosen from a list provided by staff at the City of Saint Paul Forestry Department. The city forestry department would have replanted eventually, according to their planting rotation, but we didn’t want to wait that long.