Arboretum Journal

"This time it was a rootlet of bluestem that sucked him up and lodged him in a leaf that rode the green billows of the prairie June, sharing the common task of hoarding sunlight." – Aldo Leopold, from "Marshland Elegy"















March 5, '17

The Arboretum is one of the great planned natural experiments in the world.  Considered of a handful of the great natural restoration projects, researchers from around the world take from it the lead at a time when restoration will be of the highest priority as habitats decreases and species dwindle due to encroachment and other environmental concerns.  As a piece of land within a city, its beginning were much more humble, a real hodgepodge of farmland and increasing, but accidental, urban use.  It took the kinds of efforts rarely seen for any issue in the modern times of distraction to pull together these various pockets of oak canopy, marshland, savannah, creeks and lake. To this day, it would be hard to make the case that the Arboretum is some kind of unified ecological presentation; but instead it is a researchers lab, and its very contrast of the hypothetical historical contents of the land, pre-European settlement, against what it had become through decades of neglect or farming, and now research, all show various patterns of growth and diminishment, depending upon its stage. The upper Arboretum, consisting of the nature center itself, the famous Longenecker Garden, Gallistel Woods, Teal Pond and Curtis Prairie, among others, seem fairly well-heeled. Transitions from native marsh, to savannah to oak canopy tend to move less in pockets that in a naturally occurring succession as elevation rises, then falls back down to Lake Wingra. To the south of the belt line, the Grady tract, an experiment in

Oak restoration and prairie manufacturing, seems a bit less responsive to the experiments with abundant invasive species including buckthorn and the garlic mustard and dame rockets, just to name a few.  Prescribed burns are clearly utilized here in order to eliminate the more shallow reaching roots of invasive, while allowing the more sturdy native taproots of other plants to survive. Burning can eliminate layers of leaves on the ground, opening soil to the prospect of better seeding success. Keeping buchgrasses, especially invasive, under control is critical to habitats survival for its own sake and for the sake of surrounding wildlife.  Taken in its entirety, the Arboretum is a lab that is unlike uses of landscaping, which call for a stability and visual performance; instead, the plantings and micro habitats here are bound to be ever-changing, and in that change, what we call phenology, or the observation of naturally occurring events within species, is the rule.  Today it is just before spring bloom. In a month, the transitions will begin to fill in. What will grow under the burns? To what restored portion of the marshland ponds will the waterfowl return?