Into Restoration

"My guidebook on trees says that the fruit of the wild plum, although succulent, is too sour to be eaten raw. That shows what the people who write guidebooks know. I happened to have the taste of a raw wild plum, the rich, unsullied, apricots flavor of it, fresh in my mouth." Gruchow, from Journal of a Prairie Year







When walking along the narrow side trail of the West Knoll of the Grady Tract leading down to Green Prairie, maybe hunching over to determine whether the cutest little yellow flower (weed) you have ever seen is a sundrop primrose, you are confronted with the dream of the oak savanna. It is a dream because, as you look uphill or downfield, you know you are standing in the middle of a long attempt at oak savanna restoration, a field of grass, lined by big bluestem at its edges, the memory of spidorwort and butterfly weed along the way earlier in the season, and most importantly not only the mature oaks residing over the grasses but the grubs, gathered in their bunches, indicating the old native growth of this particular landscape. It feels like a dream because, as we can so easily visualize the opening, we know the previous use of this land was for farming and that what we are seeing had not been preserved but worked, grazed, tilled, flattened, and for many years forgotten to receive its necessary burning. It is a dream because the walker of the savanna desires more opening, fewer grubs, no more creeping bittersweet choking off the trees to either side of the knoll. A dream because we know that if we were dropped onto this same very plot in previous geological eras, post glacial, that is precisely what we would have seen, and wouldn't it have been marvelous to watch play out in its geologic time that harmony of features that made up the lower quadrant of southwest Wisconsin – the deep grassroots layer rising to catch its full dose of sunshine, shaded by the happily infrequent oak canopy cover, and to hear the peace of the prairie birds in spring rise from limb to limb. Today it seems more like a biotic puzzle, in which many of the fragmented pieces are still out there but must by definition now thrive only by assistance of the very human hand that created the disturbance in the first place.  Without lightening, for instance, the prescribed burn must preserve the integrity of the friendship between prairie and oak; without the gloved hand holding the loppers how could the understory survive the voracious appetite of the bittersweet vine which climbs to sunlight choking off at tightened spirals the native tree column. Putting the puzzle back together again seems a reassembling of a dream that is educational and probably more necessary than many could come to understand. Just as the dominant mission of humanity had been the expansion and subjugating of the land for 150 years, it might very well take another 150 for what might end up being called the era of counter restoration. As we bend down to touch the tiny petals of the sundrop, the bright yellow is a micro sign of a perfect little inch of the soil as it leads out to a clear draw where the oak stands as a thousand exclamation points.