Spring with the Natives

Last night we watched the documentary film Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf, which is available for streaming for a $5 donation to a food charity through Memorial Day. Oudolf is the landscape artist behind the High Line in New York, Lurie Gardens in Chicago, and many others. He designs spaces that mix native and non-native plants in communities, as he says, as performers on the stage that he then lets do their thing for all seasons, complementing each other in bloom and color. The seasons go from fall through fall, definitely to help people see the beauty that is fall in a native plant community. In other words, it’s not just about the blooms.

In this way, he is part of an important movement, helping people see natural landscapes not just as about controlled and showy blooms but the beauty of seed pods, of grasses, of foliage changing shape and color. The palette, which includes plenty of purples and reds and yellows, also includes shades of beiges and browns and oranges. When you hit the second fall of the film, you’ve got it.

Here it is spring. And lucky me could come up after the film and see this stunning vision of sunset after a cloudy day from my window, the prairie and its paths.

This morning, a cool and humid one, Steve and I walked back to look at an area of “high ground” that is bordered by wetlands, which is full of prickly ash and other “invasives” that are on good enough ground that it could be reclaimed. Steve now has the equipment, a forestry mulcher, to clear that land, and as we turn our focus away from the more “lived” spaces of the farm to the wilder spaces in need of reclamation, it is exciting to see what is there.

There is a well-worn deer path, multiple ones, that demonstrate the habitat. And the deer come out mornings and evenings, along with turkeys and sand hill cranes, to a low, wet spot to chomp on horsetail, which we insensitively called “Indian puzzle” as kids. In that area there is also rocket cress and the first signs of flowering pants. In higher areas, the lupine and other plants are coming to the edge of their glory.

In the woods are honeysuckle, black cherry, nanaberry (and the always distressing buckthorn), a combination of invasive and the beautiful. For Steve, it’s a project and when you’re out there, looking through the prickly ash at the wetland where the sandhills nest, the promise of that project, reclaiming a gorgeous acre and opening up more land for more explorable beauty, as if we need more than we already have.

In this time of Covid-19, people are taking time to explore their local environments more deeply. They’re appreciating slowing down and looking at the plants, birds, and animals with whom we share the world. The birds sound louder, the animals feel (or are) closer, the air seems cleaner and the plants seem more colorful. In this week, patience with “stay at home” orders is getting thin, and the social situation feels tense and even, at times, mean-spirited. And our walk was marred by the presence of gnats, which swarmed when there was no breeze. I didn’t see any ramps or morels out there, and I’m not ready to eat horsetail or rocket cress (leaves are really small). In other words, the walk didn’t “give” me anything, except that most precious thing, beauty and a sense that the world is abundant and alive.