Thoughts That Lie Too Deep For Tears

  Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

 Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

    To me the meanest flower that blows can give

  Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

                  

                                          William Wordsworth

Why do I feel this way - on early July mornings in the ancient savanna?
How could I share?
I'll reveal what I can.

Truly, I'm in love.

Daybreak is so deeply sweet.
A time to take photographs - and notice ecosystem successes - and needs.

The tallgrass savanna is a world that almost didn't still exist.
We work hard to help it recover full diversity, health, and the expression of itself.

If you're interested in names: those curling leaves are big blue stem, here sprawling under orange butterfly milkweed. The grayish foliage on the left (topped by flowerbuds for next week) is leadplant. I'm in the moment, but I'm also in the future; those buds proclaim soon purple and orange lead plant flowers, swarming with their special pollinators. The fine grass is dropseed - conservative royalty of prairie quality. Huge wide leaves are prairie dock - busy putting up seven-foot flower stalks. The pale green, barely starting to unfurl down in front, will later be heath aster, one of the last flowers of autumn.

Black-eyed Susan knits the world together by living both on roadsides and in the finest savannas.
Prairie lily is so rare and conservative that we despaired of ever restoring it.
Then for a few years, with a lot of work, we saw one or two per year.
This year there were dozens, widely spread.
Most bloomed earlier and are now fattening seeds.
On the right - the fine leaves topped by a cluster of buds are the rare purple prairie clover - which will be the star here in two weeks.

New Jersey tea. Blooming on both sides of one of our trails. 

If you haven't been to Somme, this is how our trails look. You might think this path semi-invisible, but it's easy to follow - and most places aren't this overgrown. We very much need the seeds of the New Jersey tea, so we let them sprawl wherever they want, until the seeds are ripe. 

Thus, when we walk these footpaths, we're in the ecosystem. We don't just see it. The ecosystem touches us as we touch it. Butterflies and beetles land on our shoulders. (We wear repellent to keep ticks and chiggers off our legs and ankles. How did the Native Americans do that?)

The bugs above are three hairstreak butterflies. They too are drawn to New Jersey tea. (The third hairstreak is facing us, and thus a thin gray line, if you look close.)

If you'd like to look at a hairstreak close up. Here's one:

Close up, with apparently only one antenna. But look close, again. The other if facing us, and the "line" becomes a "dot." Friends, we see from one perspective at a time. That's the best we can do. 

Does this look like one big flower? A compass-plant "flower" is, technically, many separate flowers. The scores of little male flowers (in the middle with the curly stamens) provide only pollen. The twenty-six female flowers (yellow "petals" around the edge) will each make one fat seed.

Compass-plants are taller than we are. Their roots go way deeper than the flowers are tall. Not every year do they bloom. The roots store up energy annually until the plants sense that the time is right, and then most bloom at once. 2018 seems a good year for them here.

A rare photo (from a fleeting moment of misty light up close and blue sky behind). I walk mornings with my camera on misty days. Cloud-filtered light makes the best flower photos. So I rarely catch a patch of blue sky. I love cloudy days. 

Mixed sun and shade: Here, early rays of bright light shine on a lead plant and wild quinine, while the sun isn't up on everything lower. Still in the shade: prairie dock, black-eyed Susan, rattlesnake master, bastard toadflax, bush clover, wild bergamot, purple prairie clover, Leiberg's panic grass, Culver's root, gray dogwood, and fleabane. Rich.

Okay, bright harsh light. Not my favorite. But a rare sight worth documenting. A Michigan lily stem topped by eight flowers. Overpopulated deer often eat down lilies, orchids, gentians and others until there's little left. The Michigan lily differs from prairie lily in that the petals are curved almost into a circle, and the flowers face down. This six-foot, healthy plant suggests the deer aren't so over-populated here as they once were. For a time, no lilies bloomed. After deer control started, in the 1990s, we began to see little two-foot plants with one flower each. We welcomed them back.

A few days later, the leadplants are starting to put out their purple, along a dewy trail. Most of the vegetation along this trail descends from seeds we held in our hands and threw to the wind. Birds and butterflies found their ways back, as home recovered. Bless them all.

Canada milk vetch with butterfly milkweed and leadplant.
We looked far and wide to find local genotype seeds. Now they're common here.

But take a couple of steps back and check out the process. Here the dry stems of last year's tall grass show that this part wasn't burned this spring. The growing buckthorn shrub on the left tells the same story. Without regular burning, every grass and wildflower here would be blotted out. Also gone would be the birds, frogs, and pollinators. We thank the Forest Preserve staff for a fine burn program.

How do we feel about parasites, like the orange one above?

No one writes:

To me the meanest parasite that grows   

                  May sometimes give thoughts too deep for tears?

The yellow-orange patch above is a parasitic morning glory called dodder. Where certain plants are "over-abundant" (in the opinion of the dodder), it sucks up some of their energy and makes way for more diversity. Our deep thoughts would best encompass fire and animals (grazers, pollinators, predators, etc. etc.). Creative destruction processes are part of the mystery and magic.

Here, closer to the trees, dodder and fire and working together and against each other. Fire burned the scarlet oak (see burned older stem and this year's vigorous re-sprout). It did not burn the little thicker-bark-protected bur oak in the middle distance. Dodder will thin out the dense mountain mint and tall goldenrod. Every year here is increasingly diverse with rare plants and animals, competing and being symbiotic.

Under a large tree, a recently restored species is proliferating. Starry campion must compete with the somewhat "thuggish" sawtoothed and woodland sunflowers.

Now the woodland sunflower has started to bloom, but the (until recently, very rare) starry campion continues to give it a run for its money. Some species seem to take a while for their genetics to adjust to a new home. Then they explode.

Many of the white oaks have burned and dead lower branches (see brown leaves on right). With less oak shade, the compass plants, prairie clovers, and tall grasses will advance. In years without fire, the oaks will do the same. 

Prairie dock with its long leafless flower stalks seems to be happier among the trees than its closer relative, compass plant. Over the decades, the species sort themselves out. And when a tree finally dies, full sun comes back, the plants re-sort, and it all starts over again.

Further back under the trees, tall bellflower (blue, upper left) joins the fray.

A clearwing moth. Holding still, thus the rare animal photo from me. Birds sing, and pollinators flit around as I aim my cell-phone camera. I care for them, am aware, feel enriched, but mostly others must take their photos for you. (Thank you, to all the animal photographers.)

Now purple prairie clover blooms in full. Swarming (blurrily here) with little rare stingless bees and other pollinators. Characteristic of high-quality prairie and open savanna.

In some places, the purple is joined by the even rarer white prairie clover. The white seemed for many years like it might not adapt to Somme at all. There were just a handful of plants, in some years none found at all. We continued to look for new local populations that might have more robust gene pools.

Our emotions seem like those of a parent or a doctor. The child needs to grow itself. The patient needs to heal. Our job is to care for them, not to dominate or control. 

This year, 2018, for the first time, white prairie clover seems to be seriously taking off. We'd helped it a bit over the years. Now its own energies proliferate it.

In other areas, the purple is massively alone. Also alone is another example of the drama. See that cream color lower left?

This lonely plant is prairie cinquefoil - the only one we found anywhere in the preserve this year. Some years we find none. Will this be a species that just doesn't adapt? We have found very few local plants to gather seed from over the years. Maybe the gene pool is too impoverished. Maybe we'll find better sources. Maybe this species is just slow (but after 40 years?). Maybe this species just won't thrive under conditions here.

About double of what we found when we started, Somme Prairie Grove now has 487 native plant species and many thousands of (mostly invertebrate) animal species. Most of them increasingly take care of themselves. The patient recovers. The child matures. Bless them.

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Thanks to hundreds of volunteers for the great restoration.

Thanks to Kathy Garness for proofing and edits.