00:00My name is Jack Harrison and I'm the American Prairie Lead at Waykhurst.
00:04The American Prairie is a large area of the gardens made up of all North American plants.
00:12So everything you can see here is a prairie plant from North America.
00:17The reason we chose prairie plants is because they've got a knack for being very drought tolerant, which is important.
00:24Once you get it established, it doesn't take very much watering.
00:26And we're pretty well established now.
00:30So these dominant plants are Oryngium yucopholium and they open up white.
00:38They're amazing for pollinators and they sort of dominate the landscape and make it about six foot tall.
00:46And then we've got Helianthus here, which is a sunflower species, but a much smaller than your typical sunflower.
00:56And then these big ones behind me, these are sylphiums, sylphium asteriscus.
01:04So we've got quite a diverse group growing in here.
01:08There's a purple aster down there.
01:11But yeah, we've managed to establish the prairie.
01:14It's been quite hard work.
01:16The first year, it was all yellow, made up of these annuals down here, which are rubecchia.
01:22And they act a bit like a poppy does in this country.
01:28So once the ground's disturbed, they begin to colonise the area and then they set seed.
01:36But because the soil doesn't get as much disturbance as when we first sowed it, they sort of disappear from the landscape.
01:42And it gets overtaken by these longer-lived species.
01:47And we're up to about 80 species at the moment that I've managed to go to flowering.
01:54Some of them have taken about five years to flower.
02:00So yeah, it's been a project about five years in the making.
02:04And it's only going to keep getting taller and taller in the future.
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