Arboretum Diary

"One of the best ways to preserve prairie flowers in a wild hay meadow is to reserve an unmoved strip each year, rotating the location of the strip. This enables each plant to go to seed occasionally, and incidentally improves cover for prairie chickens and pheasants." Leopold, from "Wildflower Corners," from For the Health of the Land





8/28

Nearing the end of summer seems like a good time to begin thinking again like a prairie. Spring comes and the eye is dazzled by the new palette of color replacing the cardboard monotony of late freeze.  This is a time to ask what has grown well in the prairie, what are strategies for this next spring? Leopold was a master strategist, always thinking as if inside the mind of a farmer who he wished would take in similar account for the varieties not only of growth beyond the cash crop but for the sake of game management to come.  This was a holistic approach to farming before the term was in play and today, as readers seek solutions to the fact that topsoil erosion accounts for half of all climate change contributors, the concept has been renamed for a larger scale: carbon farming, a process in which the farmer can reclaim her land, and consider how to re-preserve carbon in the soil, by proper rotation, silviculture pasturing, horizontal moisture planting, etc.  In other words, common sense, repackaged in different terms, and a little more gusto for we now know that we are on a specific timeline for transformation. It leads me back to the simplicity of the recommendation above, for 'wildflower corners,' possibly the simplest way a farmer might have for beginning the long slow process of preserving soil and simultaneously lending a hand to pollinators, who lose habitat daily by encroachment and pesticides.  My assigned plot this past summer for the Monarch Butterfly Monitoring Program was a small four acre parcel inside the Albany Wildlife Area, essentially a mono crop and hunting area in southwestern Wisconsin.  The 4-acre  parcel had been set aside as a 'wild flower' corner and stood out, along the roadside, as a near jungle of diversity up against the green stalks of the cash crops.  Milkweed was abundant. All other wildflower standards, like the yellow cone, brown-eyed, field thistle, purple prairie clover, etc. were abundant, and the non native in sparse appearance.  On my last trip through the prairie I spotted 19 monarchs either in flight or nectaring.  The experience would be something like walking through a distinct 4-acre plot that was lined with redwoods, while all the surrounding area in sight was shrubbery.  It stirred up some awfully common sense. What would happen if every farm had its own 'wild flower corner?' The fact that it could be rotated, as Leopold suggests, would mean that the alley way of new growth wouldn't dictate future plans for the farmer.  In the meantime, save a portion from the same spray that eliminates the milkweed which eliminates the butterfly and bee.  Does such a preservation need a subsidy, or is it possible that the land ethic, as incentive, is enough? As I walked the Curtis Prairie this morning, a wild three-prong Rough Blazing Star reached out over the narrow trail.  Shooting out of the predominate big blue stem and late summer goldenrod, it looked just like its name, a meteor of purple wisps and seeds. I wondered, how long had that particular shape and function take to co-evolve with the moist soil of the native prairies? Somewhere in that line of thinking, I wondered if the wild flower corner was a way to preserve time itself, the physicality of species, the origin of color, the invisible attraction between it and the butterfly?