Arboretum Diary

"These are my suggestions for the farm arboretum: Tolerate foreign trees when they behave, but admit only natives to full citizenship. Let the arboretum be not a single segregated spot, but all odd corners where the soil fits the needs of some tree. Attach ten times more value to the tree that came in on his own steam than to the tree you had to plant." – Leopold, "The Farm Arboretum"





A swift walk along the more narrow paths cutting through Curtis Prairie is an exercise in quick picture taking. Even if rain has not fallen in some time, the Prairie here holds a handful of little creeks that fill-in the heart of the undergrowth and therefore serve mosquitos as one of the greatest foliage hideouts known along any of the five lakes shorelines. Wear long clothes, spray, or move quick to create your own breeze, which you can only hope replicates the real thing. At points there will be need to stop and take the picture that you came for in the first place and you may have to sacrifice that last uncovered square inch of neck flesh for the sake of tuning in the iPhone camera selection.  Near the east end the Orange Jewelweed is any interesting catch. Orange pouch like flowers hang from stalks "like so many windsocks," says the author of the Prairie Plants of the Arboretum.  Looking further into the data, located as it is along one of the more subtle streams of low-growth creeks, the Orange touch me not, or Impatiens Capensis more technically, is sitting right where it is supposed to be, in its "odd corners where the soil fits the needs of some tree."  Here is as good a spot for the novice prairie puzzle solver to stop and appreciate what it means to actually restore a habitat, prairie in this case, but that could be applied to virtually any disturbed, encroached or saturated parcel of land in one's home state: what fits this soil type, and will it thrive here as it once might have, and in fact belongs.  This very concept is one of the more amazing features of the restorations here – the foresight of seeing that a parcel of land has been extremely disturbed (think Leopold's own Sand Co. farm), to research what grows well in like-situated parcels, then plant and watch the co-evolution of plant and habitat do the rest of the work.  The Orange Jewelweed is said to be "abundant throughout, on stream banks, lakeshore, marshes, fens, swamps, wet thickets, moist spots in upland woods, around springs and seeps, ravines, and ditches; wet or damp soils."  At this point, I now know that when I see the orange windsocks, either it was planted by accident -- not very likely -- or it is thriving because of good wet earth. I now know that when I am near the plant that "Bumblebees, honeybees, and the ruby-throated hummingbirds appear to be good pollinators." As such, I would champion the native plant, knowing as I do that bees could use all the help they can get a time when their standard fare has been eradicated or sprayed.  I now know that its namesake, jewelweed, makes as good of sense as butterfly weed, one of the great feeders of Monarchs, but threatened in the state of Wisconsin.  So much to see with one click of the camera.