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An educational walk through a first-rate prairie reconstruction
Each summer, the local conservation group Grand
Prairie Friends employs two college-age interns to help maintain the natural
areas under its care. The interns learn much about how difficult it is to
control invasive plants and how exhausting it can be to work outdoors all
season long.
But the job also offers some less strenuous educational
opportunities as well.
One of those is a tour with Grand Prairie Friends
board president Jamie Ellis of a prairie reconstruction established and
maintained by Don Gardner in northern Ford County. Gardner’s prairie is one of
the oldest, finest and best-monitored reconstructions of native habitat in the
state.
I never made it out to help the interns pull
garlic mustard or cut bush honeysuckle on a 100-degree day this summer, but
they and Ellis allowed me to tag along on their visit to Gardner’s prairie
earlier this month anyway.
Gardner is a friendly, open person who clearly
enjoys sharing the wealth of knowledge he has developed in nearly four decades
of work on the site. It’s situated on a small portion of the farmland his family
has owned for generations, land that had always been pasture until 1974.
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| Gardner with compass plant. |
What motivated Gardner to do something different
with it?
He remembered the native flowers he had seen along
the railroad rights-of-way as a child, and he wondered if he could reproduce
something of the landscape in which they had originally thrived.
The original part of Gardner’s prairie
reconstruction covers just over seven acres, but it wasn’t all planted at once.
He established it in smaller sections because he used only seed that he and
others had hand-collected from native plants growing within a short distance of
the site. The last section of this original reconstruction was planted in 1990,
with exception of a plot that was purposely left unseeded. This plot serves as
a control for studies monitoring the population dynamics of the plant community
of the reconstruction over time.
In 2001 Gardner added another 7-plus acres from an
adjoining cultivated field to his prairie, bringing the total size to the
approximately 15 acres it now occupies.
During our walk through the prairie, Ellis
occasionally quizzed the interns about the identification of plants they could
be expected to know on sight after a season in the field, including yellow
coneflower and his favorite grass, prairie dropseed. In addition, he and Gardner
both called attention to novel species as well. By the fourth time we
encountered it, even I could distinguish between Sullivant’s milkweed and
common milkweed.
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| Ellis and interns Sarah Menning and Jenna Amis. |
In a similar vein, we observed how the growth of big
bluestem, a signature plant of the tallgrass prairie, was stunted by the
presence of wood betony, which “steals” nourishment by attaching to the
bluestem’s roots. Where big bluestem is stunted, other plant species can stake
a claim.
The care and expertise that has gone into the
making of Don Gardner’s prairie reconstruction is evidenced by the diversity of
its native flora--the original portion is now characterized by more than 150
species of plants native to the grand prairie--and the scarcity of exotic
plants there. In these regards it is comparable to the highest quality prairie
remnants in the region, sites like Loda Cemetery Nature Preserve, where the
native plant community has remained intact through the years.
One can only hope the memory of Don Gardner’s
achievement remains with this year’s Grand Prairie Friends interns along with
their recollections of long hot days in the field.
