Plants for wet clay: Prairie Dock

Planted as small plugs three years ago, the Prairie Dock (Silphium terebinthinaceum - now how do you pronounce that?) put up flowers this year. But that's an understatement. The buds are small round buttons like green peony buds, the flowers are pretty yellow disks, but the real feature, or I should say features, of this plant are the tall flowering panicles (eight to ten feet or more) and the huge leaves (think 18 inches long and 10 inches wide), which emerge in spring. These photos were taken in the first week of September. I almost prefer the seed heads to flowers.