While not the showiest of the native wildflower and warm-season prairie grass meadows on the campus at Penn State’s Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, this Indiangrass dominated hillside is still eye-catching with its ripening seed plumes and interspersed collection of pollinator-friendly species including several varieties of coneflowers and milkweeds for butterflies. Indiangrass not only looks great, its root depth of five feet or more provides excellent drought resistance and assures soil stabilization even on the steepest of slopes. A single dormant-season cutting (with the deck raised) is applied annually to maintain this and numerous other meadow parcels around the hospital complex.
