Prairie Signs and Wonders

“By all these lovely tokens, September days are here, with summer’s best of weather, and autumn’s best of cheer.”–Helen Maria Hunt Jackson

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August slows, and puts on her turn signal. Autumn lies just ahead. The signs are all around us.

In my backyard prairie patch, the goldfinches work the cup plant seedheads–then sip a drink from yesterday’s rainwater, pooled in the leaves.

Nearby, a lone monarch appears on the zinnias, delicately sourcing fuel for its migration flight to Mexico. Hasta la vista. What a tough year it’s been for you, monarchs.

 

Hikes on the prairies after work end sooner. Shorter days. Earlier sunsets.

The tallgrass is peppered with dark chocolate coneflower seedheads; limned with early goldenrod.

In the first light of morning, deep in the dew, the white-faced meadowhawks appear. Harbingers of fall. Their kin, the green darners and wandering gliders, black saddlebags and variegated meadowhawks, have already taken wing and left the Midwest. What a wonder, that they can disappear into the winds to fly thousands of miles! The non-migratory dragonflies  are tied to this place, however, and wait helplessly for the cold.

There is a more spare look to the landscape. It moves from cheerful to slightly melancholy. Lonelier.

The jewelweed opens along the prairie’s creeks. Hummingbirds work the flowers for nectar, mindful that they’ll soon need energy to make the long trip south. Come on! You can almost hear the monarchs and dragonflies whisper to the hummers. It’s getting late. Go!

 

Summer is ending. We see dimly ahead. Wonder what’s around the corner.

Something new.

Something different.

And always, adventures to anticipate.

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The opening quote is from Helen Maria Hunt Jackson (1830-1885), who was a novelist and tireless advocate for Native Americans. She was also a classmate of Emily Dickinson. She suffered many difficult losses during her life–parents, siblings, children, her husband. At the time of her death from cancer, Jackson was still advocating for Native American rights from her sickbed. Although some have criticized her prose as “middlebrow,” she used her words to change the world she lived in for the better.

All photos copyright Cindy Crosby: (top to bottom):  cup plant (Silphium prefoliatum) with American goldfinches (Spinus tristis), author’s backyard prairie patch, Glen Ellyn, IL; monarch (Danaus plexippus), author’s backyard garden zinnias (Zinnia spp., certified Monarch Way Station), Glen Ellyn, IL; Russell Kirt Prairie, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL; early goldenrod (Solidago juncea) and pale purple conehead (Echinacea pallida) seeds, Nachusa Grasslands, The Nature Conservancy, Franklin Grove, IL; white-faced meadowhawk, Schulenberg Prairie, The Morton Arboretum, Lisle, IL;  Nachusa Grasslands, The Nature Conservancy, Franklin Grove, IL; jewelweed (Impatiens capensis), Clear Creek Unit, Nachusa Grasslands, The Nature Conservancy, Franklin Grove, IL;  Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans) with tall coreopsis (Coreopsis tripteris) and big bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) also visible in the fog, Schulenberg Prairie, The Morton Arboretum, Lisle, IL; Schulenberg Prairie,  The Morton Arboretum, Lisle, IL.

The Best Prairie Restorations

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

–Annie Dillard

 I can’t get Dillard’s simple observation out of my head.

How do I want to spend my days? This new year?

I want make time. To be there.

To look at the prairie up close, and marvel at a seed head’s complexity.

To listen to the empty wild white indigo pods, tap-tap-tapping in the wind.

To notice the tracks of a coyote in the snow and follow them…

…find the remains of her dinner in the snow…

…a reminder of how fleeting and precious life is.

How violence and beauty coexist in the natural world.

Let me soak up the colors of prairie grasses around a lake…

…marvel at the ice forming on the grasses…

Take time to notice the kaleidoscope of the sky.

Sunrises.

Sunsets.

And all the ways the clouds configure themselves in-between. Such ongoing drama! Yet, the bison on the prairie graze beneath the sky, oblivious.

Don’t they know? Each day may be our last.

I want to admire the unpopular opossum, with his face like a valentine.

Be there to see the moon rise in the East,  like a smile.

Appreciate the play of light and shadows on snow.

Why? Making time to be fully present to life on the prairie helps me be fully present to life off the prairie. To the people I love. To the work that I do.  It is restoration of another kind. The restoration of my soul.

There might come a time when I may no longer be able to hike the tallgrass. Until then, I’m storing away images in my mind.

Inhaling deeply so the smells of the prairie are etched into my memory. Mentally recording the sounds of the sandhill cranes and the song sparrow. Remembering how the tallgrass brushes my face.

If  the time comes when I can no longer physically hike the prairie, I’ll still be able to sit and think back on how I spent my days. The images will be there, like pages in a scrapbook. I’ll count my life richer for this: paying attention.

All photos by Cindy Crosby (top to bottom): figwort (Scrophularia marilandica), Schulenberg Prairie, The Morton Arboretum, Lisle, IL; bee balm (Monarda fistulosa) SP; unknown seed, SP; white wild indigo pods (Baptisia alba), SP; coyote tracks, SP; squirrel kill, SP; coyote, SP: grasses, Meadow Lake, The Morton Arboretum, Lisle, IL; grasses and ice, ML; grasses and ice, ML; sunrise, Newton Park, Glen Ellyn, IL; sunset, Nachusa Grasslands, Franklin Grove, IL; clouds over bison, NG; opossum, author’s backyard prairie, Glen Ellyn, IL; crescent moon over author’s prairie, GE; blue shadows, SP; coyote, SP; switchgrass (Panicum virgatum), SP.

Note: SP, NG, GE: Schulenberg Prairie, Nachusa Grasslands, Glen Ellyn.

Quote from  Annie Dillard is from The Writing Life.

 

Seeing Prairie

I took a friend of mine, a professor, to see the tallgrass prairie where I volunteer as a steward. He listened as I enthusiastically chattered about the amazing array of plants, the value of diversity, the use of prescribed fire, and the excitement of preserving and restoring native landscape. As I spoke, he was silent. Finally, I quit talking and waited to hear what he thought.

“Weeds, Cindy. It’s nothing but weeds.”

How do you see prairie?

For Native Americans, the prairie was a grocery store, full of good things to eat. Bastard toadflax seeds were a tasty snack, the young shoots of many prairie plants tasted like asparagus. It was also a pharmacy, with plants that were believed to have potential to heal anything that ailed you, from snakebite to colic. The prairie contained roots used as  love charms and fire-starters; leaves to smoke during ceremonies or — if you knew their secrets — plants you could use in concoctions to eliminate your worst enemy.

Early settlers saw the prairie as a place to conquer. The deep, interlocking root system of prairie plants, which evolved to withstand drought, were almost impenetrable to farmers until the invention of the John Deere plow in 1837.

For those who had made the long trek out to Illinois from the woodlands of the east, the Midwestern tallgrass prairie seemed lonely and barren. James Monroe, our fifth president, reported in 1786 on what is now Illinois with these words, “A great part of the territory is miserably poor… .”

Others, like pioneer Eliza Steele, saw the Illinois prairie and were instantly enchanted. They had imagination to see the beauty of the treeless tallgrass that stretched from horizon to horizon.

Developers or farmers might look at a prairie today and see wasted land — land that is a bare canvas, waiting for something useful to be done with it. They see potential. And dollar signs.

Others, like myself, see the prairie through a kaleidoscope lens. It’s a place to preserve for the future through maintaining a vanishing landscape of plants, animals, insects, birds, and amphibians.  It’s a place of perspiration — we invest in it through the sweat equity we build when we pull weeds, cut brush, collect seeds, and set prescribed burns. It’s a place of inspiration: for poetry, art, photography, and music.

Some people argue the prairie has only the value we assign to it; that it has no intrinsic value of its own. I believe there is inherent value in the prairie, no matter what value we assign to it for ourselves.

But unless we take time to really look at prairie, spend time on prairie, and attempt to understand what makes prairie something different and special, we’ll see the tallgrass as my friend the professor did.

Nothing but weeds.

(All photos by Cindy Crosby. Top to bottom: Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta), Schulenberg Prairie, The Morton Arboretum, Lisle, IL; whitetail deer, SP; white prairie clover (Dalea candida), SP; halloween pennant dragonfly (Celithemis eponina), SP; autumn, Nachusa Grasslands, Franklin Grove, IL; summer, SP; autumn, NG; volunteer, SP; obedient plant (Physostegia virginiana), SP.)

More than Bison

The flower-fed buffaloes of the spring

In the days of long ago,

Ranged where the locomotives sing

And the prairie flowers lie low…

–Vachel Lindsay

I went for a hike a few days ago at Nachusa Grasslands, 90 miles west of Chicago, where I volunteer as a dragonfly monitor. Nachusa has been in the news in Illinois quite a bit over the past several months.

The spotlight on this amazing 3,200-acres-plus mosaic of prairie, wetlands and woodlands revolves around Nachusa’s successful bison introduction last fall.

The first baby bison birth announcements have hit the front pages of the newspapers. There’s a lot of excitement over these charismatic megafauna and their cute offspring, and deservedly so. But, it’s easy to forget some of the more humble inhabitants — more than 700 species — who live at this beautiful place.

One of these inhabitants – and one of the first prairie wildflowers to bloom at Nachusa — is one of the most fleeting and difficult to see.

The pasque flower.

Also known as the Easter flower, wild crocus, prairie crocus, or windflower, pasque flowers (Anemone patens) bloom for a week or two in early spring. The pale lavender blooms are almost invisible against last year’s prairie grasses. Then, before you can blink, they’re gone.

We’re at the southeasterly boundary of the hairy pasque flower’s range in upper Illinois. Looks furry, doesn’t it? Native Americans said the Great Spirit gave the pasque flowers those hairs to serve as a warm furry robe, in gratitude for helping a young man.

In “Wildflowers of the Tallgrass Prairie: The Upper Midwest” authors Sylvan Runkle and Dean Roosa tell us the pasque flower is highly toxic; none-the-less used by Native Americans and early settlers medicinally. Various concoctions were used to treat “nervous exhaustion.”

Runkle and Roosa also tell us when the Dakota Indians spotted the first pasque flower, they sang a special song.  Singing was believed to encourage the rest of the prairie to bloom.

Paying attention, noticing the wildflowers, composing songs in honor of their blooms and the blooms to come…

After a long cold winter, perhaps this pasque flower tradition — singing the prairie to life — is  the best medicine of all.

Thanks to Thomas Dean for introducing me to the poem, The Flower-Fed Buffaloes by Vachel Lindsay, excerpted above. The complete poem is available online at The Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/242582. The Native American story of the hairs of the pasque flower is found at http://galileo.org/kainai/pasque-flower/.

All photos above by Cindy Crosby, taken at Nachusa Grasslands, Franklin Grove, IL: Nachusa headquarters; two photos of bison; Prairie Pot Holes Unit;  and six different photos of pasque flowers in various stages of bloom and post-bloom.