Mature Prairie: Life After Weeds

It’s amazing what one week of gorgeous weather will do for a person and a landscape. Everything is good. I am glad I was born in June, because it is such a happy month. October is still my favorite month, but June is a close second. It has been a week for walking around. Oh yes, lots of time has been spent weeding the garden, where the weeds have come up in the most astounding clumps, just hundreds of little leaves popping up all together, veritable armies of pigweed and maple trees and other things I don’t let live long enough to identify. But the plants are also happy. Everything is not just planted but up. Everything is up. Garlic is way up. Onions and shallots, up. Cucumbers and squashes all have multiple leaves. Peas are climbing the trellises, even the beans, though rabbits have gotten a few, have developed quickly and profusely in their long row. However, it is the prairie that has been calling me this past week. I’ve been drawn to it, because it looks different. It was burned this spring and as it has come in, it has looked, well, mature. It has looked like flowers with big spaces between that are not filled with weeds. I can even see this from afar. It makes me keep wanting to go out there. And so I have been walking the paths. When I went out to walk the paths on Saturday, once again the lupine took my breath away. They have this impact on me every year– I always forget. They are so dramatic, the only blooming thing, and in big bunches of cones covered with little purple pouches. This year we counted ten different lupine plants while walking the outer rim trail, more than last year and farther afield. What is truly amazing, though, is the promise of flowers to come. In the prairie there were all these tall, dead stalks, black-eyed Susan, grey-headed coneflowers, alexander, milkweed, and at the base was a profusion of leaves, this year’s flowers. I don’t remember ever seeing that before– the dead flower and a big bunch of new life.

Usually what we’ve seen this time of year is competition. We’ve seen the big, burly weeds still coming in as strong as the wildflowers. Yes, the wildflowers have been winning, but not like this. This is it! This is what you hope for in the years of prairie restoration.

It is true that there are still grasses in there, and I’m not talking bluestem. There’s a lot of fescue and bluegrass, but those “lawn” grasses are not like the reed canary and brome that threatens the prairie and continues to come up in the wet parts especially. In fact, these other grasses are kind of pretty, too, with their wiry little stalks. But as for the flowers, well, I just had to lie down out there and look up at the blue sky, look across at ground level and see all the prairie flower greenery. I was quite caught up. And I still am. It is so gratifying to see the prairie coming in like this. I remember not too long ago when it just all seemed like struggle— the spraying and mowing and the weeds, weeds, weeds.

The thing about nature is, it is only at its peak a very short time. Shakespeare’s sonnets are full of that sentiment. There is struggle and competition and decay and disease and failed germination and storms and hail and drought and mosquitoes and pocket gophers and weeds without end! It is a miracle that things survive and that beauty continues. Oh, what beauty!