Arboretum Diary

"Just why the prairie plants stood up under the grazing by buffalo and elk, but now succumb to cows, is a mystery. Perhaps the answer is barbed wire, which keeps the cows too long in one place." – Leopold, "Roadside Prairies"








Just how much history the old prairie empires of Wisconsin upheld for their end of the evolutionary bargain is awfully hard to say, but as Leopold points out, unfortunately they didn't stand much of a chance up against roadway encroachment, the thorough blade of the till or boxed-in conditions of the hungry cow. At Curtis Prairie we can see how nature would prefer itself, a system of biota tightly woven together, each species expanding, contracting, dominating, or submitting to the course of water or nutrients, creating for us, at the very least, a visual display "unlike books, which divulge their meaning only when you dig for it, the prairie plants yearly repeat their story, in technicolor, from the first pale blooms of pasque in April to the wine-red plumes of bluestem in the fall."  The near eradication of prairies is a story that might have been written by the fate of expansion, but it is one that has more chapters left to write. If not for the preservation of a few of these remnants, we might not have had the historical archive to see and study but because we do, 'restoration' no doubt needs to be a common theme of this century: "we have thousands of miles of roadside, the outside edges of which are often too steep or rough to mow, already fenced against cows, and kept cleared of brush to prevent snowdrifts. Most of this potential prairie garden is being faithfully stirred up by roadside machinery, after which it goes over, for keeps, to quack grass and sweet clover. Why not let these edges alone and replant them to prairie?" It is the work of a lifetime of the likes of Leopold to try to get passers-by to consider a prairie or a farm something other than the flashing image that is seen by car driver. The massive passing images of monoculture corn are seen as symbols of feeding the world and let pass. The technicolor of the remaining prairie something of an oddity, a sort of painting by the hands of concerned citizens. To reverse the logic, one might see the lost acreage and topsoil of corn crops as potential for proper rotation or carbon farming permaculture; the prairie not as exotic gem, but as should be.  Sometimes the old is mistaken for the backwards and left for dead by the modern. What is a more novel thought, and one that sees forward, might come to think that in some cases the past is the future.