Visiting Nearby Grasslands - A Peek Into Other Places and Times

As I work to re-establish a reasonably functional prairie on our Back 5, one of my constant inner questions is, "What was here originally?"  It's hard to know, since years of use as a pasture, including significant overgrazing for at least the last few years, had removed most of the tastier plants from the existing plant palette and substituted weedier ones by the time we purchased the property.  In a region where tallgrass prairie is just beginning to morph into midgrass prairie, there were essentially no clumps of prairie grass at all in that Back 5 acres.  The primary forbs were green antelopehorn, western ragweed, Baldwin's ironweed, yarrow, and white sage - all plants that cattle don't care for, which tend to grow more strongly as their competition is munched away. 

So, to see what we're missing in our palette, I watch the ditches for vegetative clues (but our ditches have been denuded of perennials by the County road crews who, I am convinced, consider them to be their personal lawn spaces).  I look in pastures as we drive by.  And occasionally I'm lucky enough to be invited to walk through and explore nearby pastures.  That's when I get my best clues.

A fellow Sedgwick County Extension Master Gardener, Sid, extended one of those lucky invitations to me for last Friday morning.  So, of course, I went.  I explored his pasture last June, too, about 2 weeks earlier in the growing season than this year.  What would I see again?  Would I see anything new?

Sid and his wife live on land that was homesteaded by his ancestress - a legendary matriarch, a recent widow at the time she homesteaded, who built a house in the middle of a section of land so that each of her 4 sons would have a quarter section for themselves when they reached adulthood.   With the land being in the same family for generations now, there is a sense of continuity of ownership, an understanding of how the land has been utilized over the years, that is often lacking in land that has changed ownership many times.

One of the things Sid wanted to show me were the patches of black-eyed Susan he'd successfully created in his lawn simply by waiting last summer until the black-eyed Susan had set seed, then mowing in a pattern that concentrated the seed into the areas where he wanted it.

The patches were beautiful - and filled with pollinators when we examined the flowers up close.

Next we went out into the pasture.  Many of the plants were ones I'd seen last year:  Junegrass, blue wild indigo (with all the leaves eaten off this summer), cream wild indigo, a single bloom of catclaw sensitive briar, purple poppy mallow, yarrow, spiderwort, leadplant.....

This year I noticed a few more plants blooming, too, that I hadn't noticed last year.  For example, the plant pictured above is woolly verbena (Verbena stricta) growing along the trail that the cattle use most frequently.  Woolly verbena has deep roots and is very drought tolerant, but it's bitter tasting, so the cattle don't eat it and it tends to increase in pastures.

I also noticed both white and purple prairie clovers, Dalea candida and Dalea purpurea.

Sid pointed out narrow-leafed milkweed (Asclepias stenophylla), ...

where I was lucky enough to catch a milkweed longhorn (Tetraopes sp.) and a longhorned grasshopper nymph hanging out together.  Do you see the grasshopper nymph almost mirroring the position of the milkweed beetle, a few inches up and to the left?

Another blossom that caught my eye on Friday was the tall, pink spike of tickclover (Desmodium sp.).  Not realizing that there were 4 possible species to be found in our area of Kansas, I didn't look at either the blooms or the leaves very closely.  I'll have to return to identify this species more accurately, although I strongly suspect it's Illinois tickclover (Desmodium illinoense).

I also saw a little, annual, yellow flax (Linum sulcatum), that I've seen in our Back 5 once or twice over the years, and prairie petunia, a.k.a. fringe-leaf ruellia, (Ruellia humilis).  The latter has become one of my favorites as I've watched it bloom over and over again, rather hidden down in the grass, not complaining despite extreme heat and crushing drought.  I'd love to get some prairie petunia started in my flower beds, but I haven't been able to collect seed pods or to transplant successfully so far.

Most fun of all, this year the sand plums (Prunus angustifolia) were sporting a bumper crop of fruit, which was well into ripening.   Sid picked a couple handfuls and we enjoyed a delicious taste of the prairie to go along with our visual feast.

On the way back to the cool of the lawn chairs sitting in the breezy shade, I glimpsed a carpet of golden yellow shining through the trees.  When I asked about it, Sid responded that it was "just that weed", from which description I recognized plains coreopsis (Coreopsis tinctoria), a pretty annual that grows primarily in ditches and crop fields around here.  As we walked, I noticed a single, straggly plant of it along the path we were following.


I mentioned that I loved plains coreopsis, but that I didn't have much of it growing on our property.  Sid was surprised by that, since it is so common in "wild areas" around here, but actually I wasn't surprised at all.  Plains coreopsis is an annual or very short-lived perennial and, as such, is basically an early successional plant.  We don't have much bare ground on our property where it might take root.

As I started to talk about plant succession, it occurred to me that many gardeners aren't very familiar with the concept of succession, and it's a concept that I find VERY useful in understanding plant behavior in the garden.  This post is long enough...but succession sounds like a great topic for a post in the near future!  I doubt you'll ever look at weeds the same way, once you learn about this interesting concept.

Patchwork Prairie

Several years ago now, I asked for suggestions on what to name our little piece of property.  I got a few suggestions, but none of them seemed right.  The ideas I was coming up with didn't fit either.  So I let the concept brew for a while longer and eventually a name suggested itself.

Patchwork Prairie.

It's not a fancy name...but, then, this isn't a fancy piece of property.  The name fits on many levels and, most importantly, it comes naturally as I think about our land.  So Patchwork Prairie it is.

So what do I think about our property?  Why does the concept of "patchwork" seems to fit so perfectly?

First of all, prairies themselves are patchworks of many plants:  a clump of this, a spread of that, a few individuals stitching things together throughout, another large swath of something else over here.   Different patches appear during different seasons.  It's a crazy quilt design where some pieces intermingle with others and it all changes from year to year.  To give you examples, right now, on the back 5 acres (Back Five) that we are working to restore from highly overgrazed pasture to reasonable prairie, I have large swaths of tall dropseed (Sporobolus compositus) developing.  I didn't notice any tall dropseed at all in our Back Five until the second year we were here; now it's a major component of our grassland.  In the photo below, the tall dropseed is occurring in the two lighter gold sweeps that run from one side of this photo to the other.

There are almost a dozen patches, ranging from large to small, of dotted gayfeather (Liatris punctata).  The first summer, I noticed fewer than a dozen gayfeathers in one single, small area.  Presumably, all of the current patches have either spread from those original plants or the plants in each of them were simply too stunted to bloom for the first several years.

Heath aster (Symphyotrichum ericoides), the small, white flowers in the photo below, and silver bluestem (Bothriochloa laguroides subsp. torreyana), the grasses with the soft, fluffy seedheads in the same photo, are found throughout the Back Five, stitching all of the recovering prairie together.

An increasing number of compass plants (Silphium laciniatum) are beginning to appear scattered throughout the Back Five, acting as another "stitcher."  I found my first ones about 3 years ago, and have now counted over 2 dozen individuals.  The photo to the left shows one of only 3 compass plants that were mature enough to bloom this year.


Another stitcher, this time one that's declining as the grassland recovers, is the annual threeawn grass (Aristida sp.) that was so prevalent 6 years ago - I can walk the paths and not get a single awn in my socks these days, which is a major change from when we started.  The whitish grass, leaning over the mowed path, is a threeawn plant that I found this morning.

There are large, diffuse patches of white prairieclover (Dalea candida) in the spring

and I've even noticed a few small patches of whorled milkweed (Asclepias verticillata) developing.

On the other hand, another milkweed known as green antelopehorn (Aslcepias viridis) is dispersed everywhere during the spring, but is nowhere to be seen at this time of year.

It's not just the recovering prairie that's a patchwork on our 10 acres.  The entire property is, itself, a patchwork quilt:  the house and lawn (moving towards buffalo grass, Buchloe dactyloides) with flower beds form one major patch with smaller areas forming patterns within it.  Other patches include the courtyard; the vegetable garden; the lagoon area; the Draw; the Cedar Grove; the front tallgrass areas; and the Back Five, the recovering pasture/prairie. Within each of these patches are smaller patterns:  aromatic aster (Symphyotrichum oblongifolium) in the flower beds, rows of eastern redcedars (Juniperus virginiana) forming hedges at the edges, different vegetables in each of the raised vegetable garden beds, a large area of prairie wild rose (Rosa arkansana) in the Cedar Grove, panicled aster (Symphyotrichum lanceolatum) in the draw, pokeberry (Phytolacca americana) along the edges of the draw and up near the house.  Paths stitch the patchwork areas together.


Finally, patchwork is a perfect historical term for modern human life on the prairies too.  European and other settlers had a tradition of using even small scraps of cloth from wornout clothing or from other leftover material.  The women would gather these scraps and sew them together to make warm, artistically beautiful and intricate quilts:  patchwork quilts.  The settlements themselves formed a patchwork on the prairie of different cultures from around the world.  And, of course, the farms soon created patches in the landscape - eventually forming a quilt that almost completely replaced the original prairie with agricultural fields.

Patchwork Prairie.  It's the right name for now, and we'll be working to increase the richness of our crazy quilt of a property for as long as we are its stewards.  The pattern is set.  Our success will be measured in the future.

White Prairie Clover - Hitched to Many Things

I think I may actually get it done!  Before the next Monday morning rolls around, I may actually get all the blog posts done from my one hour walkabout last Monday morning! 

Besides the black eyed Susans that I talked about in my last post, another newly blooming perennial that was in full glory last Monday was the white prairie clover, Dalea candida.  While I find white prairie clover very easy to overlook among the grasses, prairie coneflower, black-eyed Susans, and other larger, more colorful plants of the prairie, the insects obviously don't agree with me.  This unassuming little prairie native is crowded with six-legged life while it's in bloom.

On the left hand bloom, notice the reddish brown scarab beetle and a pair of mating gray beetles (weevils?).  A sphecid wasp is flying in to join them.  (The white prairie clover blossoms are the cylindrical flowers that start blooming at the bottom and progressively open moving up to the top, often giving them a green cone effect early on.  Behind the white prairie clover blossoms in this photo is a fading yarrow flower head.)

Here a tiphiid wasp and an eastern tailed blue seem to equally divide the single white prairie clover blossom.

Separating the insects out helps us to see them a bit better.

Here is a scarab beetle, in the same beetle family that contains dung beetles, rose chafers, and June bugs.  The larvae of these beetles are the small white grubs you find in your lawns.

This mating pair of beetles look like weevils to me, although the photo is blurry enough that I can't see them well enough to identify them for sure.

Called a sphecid wasp (Prionyx atratus), this black wasp with a hairy head and thorax paralyzes grasshoppers to fill its nest with food for its larvae.  I am VERY glad to see these guys this summer.  We have grasshoppers everywhere this year.
 

With its long banded abdomen, this five banded tiphiid wasp (Myzinum quinquecinctum) is very distinctive.  While the adults feed at flowers, the larvae are parasites of small white (scarab) beetle grubs.  Legs of the adult male wasps are yellow;  legs of the adult female wasps are reddish.

There are many species of small butterflies whose gray underwings are speckled with black, white and orange.  The upper wings of these "gossamer winged butterflies," as the group is called, can be markedly different in color, ranging from bright orangish copper through duller grays to iridescent blues, but it's often hard to see the upper wing surfaces, as the butterflies usually sit with their wings closed.  At the back end of the hind wings, many of these little butterflies have a combination of a small pair of tails which look quite similar to small antennae and relatively large orange dots resembling eyes.  This pattern of markings helps confuse potential predators into aiming for the wrong end of the butterfly.

Known by the small tails - which you can't see well on this individual - and two bright orange spots set closely together at the hind edge of the rear wings, this little butterfly feeding at the white prairie clover is an eastern tailed blue (Cupido comyntas).  The caterpillars of this generalist feed on many plants in the pea and bean family.  Not surprisingly, they are quite common.  Almost all of the small gossamer wings that I saw last Monday were eastern tailed blues.

I did, however, notice a pair of slightly larger, gossamer winged butterflies at one point.  This is a gray hairstreak (Strymon melinus), another generalist whose caterpillars feed on over 50 species of plants.  Look closely to notice the difference in the markings between these two common species.  The small tails are showing nicely on this individual and illustrate well how they, combined with the flashy orange spots, could fool a predator into attacking the back end of this butterfly, allowing it to fly away relatively unscathed.

So, overall, what did I see last Monday?  A series of interrelationships through space and time, the very complexity of which helps keep the prairie in balance through changing seasons and a range of weather.  Just in this post, for example, ....   The tiphiid wasps help balance the populations of the scarab beetles.  The sphecid wasp helps balance the populations of the grasshoppers.  All but the grasshoppers help pollinate the white prairie clover.  If the weevils are the beetle I think they are, their larvae eat grass roots and help provide space for the forbs like white prairie clover to grow.  The blues and hairstreaks feed on many plants as caterpillars and help pollinate many plants as adults. 

Or, to quote John Muir, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

What are the natural interrelationships in your yard and garden?