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 be within the ecosystem - and think and dream.

The tallgrass savanna was almost gone - unrecognized remnants barely existed.
These days we work hard to help it recover full diversity, health, and itself.

You can see it better if you know the names of its animals and plants: those curling leaves above are big blue stem, here sprawling under orange butterfly milkweed. The grayish foliage on the left (topped by flowerbuds to open next week) is leadplant. I'm in the moment, but I'm also in the future; soon purple and orange leadplant flowers, will swarm with their special pollinators. The fine grass is dropseed - royalty of prairie quality. Huge wide leaves are prairie dock - busy putting up seven-foot flower stalks - from roots deeper than that. 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 high-quality that we once 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 prairie clover - which will turn this meadow purple in two weeks.

New Jersey tea. Blooming on both sides of one of our trails. This is what patriotic Americans once brewed, after they threw the high-tax British tea into Boston harbor. 

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. 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 three hairstreak butterflies. They too are drawn to New Jersey tea. 

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. We make do as best we can, trying to keep multiple perspectives in mind. 

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 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 tall lead plant and wild quinine, while everything lower is still in 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. The healthy ecosystem is rich.

A Michigan lily stem topped by eight flowers. Overpopulated deer often eat down lilies, orchids, gentians and others until there's little left. This one escaped. 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 at all. After deer control started, in the 1990s, we began to see little two-foot plants with one flower each. We welcomed them back.

Here the leadplants are starting to put out their purple, along a dewy trail. Most of this vegetation 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 for biodiversity conservation. 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 leading regular burns.

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 parasites, 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 that little thicker-barked bur oak in the middle distance. Dodder will thin out the dense mountain mint and tall goldenrod. Every year as this savanna recovers is increasingly diverse with rare plants and animals, competing and being symbiotic.

Under a large tree, a recently restored species is proliferating. Surrounding one lavender wild bergamot, white-flowered starry campion must compete with the somewhat "thuggish" sawtoothed and woodland sunflowers (all those dense green leaves).

Here 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 push them back again. 

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.)

Purple prairie clover blooms swarming (blurrily here) with little rare stingless bees and other pollinators. This classy species is 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?). 

Somme Prairie Grove now has 487 native plant species - about double the number we found when we started. It also has many thousands of rare (mostly invertebrate) animal species, fungi, and bacteria.  Most of them increasingly take care of themselves. The patient recovers. The child matures. Bless them all.

______________________________________________________________________

Thanks to hundreds of volunteers for the great restoration.

Thanks to Kathy Garness for proofing and edits.

Somme Prairie 6:02 AM - A Cool Walk on a Hot Day

Somme Prairie Nature Preserve.
49 minutes of bliss and wonder. 

Do you think it's too hot for you to enjoy nature - on a 90 degree day?

At daybreak, the weather is heaven.

 

At 6:02, the prairie was blanketed with mist. 

And just a minute later, with the sun rising and coming out from behind a cloud, the mist is on the run.

Purple Prairie Clover, a rare high-quality plant, is just starting to bloom.
And back behind it, the yellow Canada milk vetch is opening too.

Neither Purple Prairie Clover nor Canada Milk Vetch were at Somme Prairie when we first started caring for it. They came in with our seed mixes, from other nearby remnants.

The Milk Vetches are legumes that in cattle country are called "loco weed."
Perhaps these are beans that we shouldn't rashly experiment with re-frying. 

This patch is typical of many in the first quarter of the trail.
(I turn right at the fork, to see the best stuff before the light gets harsh.)
Weedy, aggressive Tall Goldenrod is dominant, often to the exclusion of most other vegetation. But here, Wild Bergamot, Prairie Clover, Black-eyed Susan, and other prairie species seem to be coming in. 

Other areas are just grass. That's not quality or natural either. A rich prairie mixes grasses and wildflowers.
Yes here, the grasses are diverse and include the rare Prairie Dropseed, a quality species.
The tall, colored stems are Big Bluestem.
Seed of quality prairie wildflowers should work wonders here. 

If you come bright and early, which I definitely recommend, be prepared to get wet.
Down the middle of this photo is the preserve path.
This is as "manicured" a path as is appropriate to a preserve like this.
You're in the ecosystem, and this wet ecosystem will soak you.

The footpath trails may not look like much in photos, but they're easy to follow and allow you to see un-trampled vegetation everywhere else.  

Wild Bergamot and Mountain Mint in bloom. 

Both of these are mints. Both have square stems and opposite leaves.
Bergamot is the flavoring of Earl Gray tea.
Mountain Mint tea was appreciated by Native Americans.
Prairie grass is the matrix, but not what mostly catches your eye.

Here the path goes between two clumps of dropseed grass and just to the right of a clumpy plant of rosinweed.
Rosinweed oozes a sap that Native Americans are said to have mixed with berries and other flavors to make a kind of chewing gum. 

Here the Bergamot is backed up by Lead Plant, with purple flower fingers. 

Compass Plant towers over the tallest person.
Those white flags marked the trail when the vegetation was shorter. 

Wild Quinine

The rare and beautiful Kalm's Brome or Prairie Brome hangs down elegantly.
But that weedy Tall Goldenrod (right) shows up in photo after photo.
Over the years there will be less and less of that species, as the higher quality plants slowly squeeze it out.

Culver's Root.

I know, but don't want to tell the name of this plant.
If you know, don't spread its name on social media.
With enough protection, it may "graduate" and not need the cages any more.
But for now, given that Somme has one of the world's largest and apparently more sustainable populations, the deer and vole exclusion cages are a good investment. Thanks, stewards!

This Michigan Lily is blooming much more often than it did for years.
Perhaps the deer control efforts are paying off.
At sites with more sustainable, natural numbers of deer, it may bloom with five flowers per stem, or twenty.
But it's nice to see even one.

Here and there along the trail you may notice dead patches, sprayed with herbicide.
This Reed Canary Grass, without control, could wipe out much of the natural vegetation.
It's invasive, and a killer. Thanks again, stewards.
(Notice the glacial boulder in the background? It's a reminder.
There is something glacial about restoring health to a challenged ecosystem.)

Just past the boulder is a brush-pile burn scar.
Yes, this ecosystem is "under construction." 

These dead leaves were a precious Violet Wood Sorrel.
That they're dead now is natural. This plant is an "ephemeral."
They enjoy the spring but always go dormant above ground for the summer. 

This same plant of Violet Wood Sorrel was shown in full bloom in the June post about this new trail. As you get to know the vegetation, it's feels good to sense past and future as part of your recognition of all these species.

Here the trail is rich with forbs (wildflowers) but poor in grass.
A healthy prairie needs both to prosper.
Stewards will sow more rare grass seed here.

This is Cord Grass - the tallest of the prairie grasses, a wetland species.
Here, it's in full flower and, unlike many grasses, is visited by lots of pollinators. What's going on?
(That building on the horizon is Underwriters Labs - our neighbor on the north.) 

The northwest part of the loop trail goes through dense brush.
Winter work for the stewards here. 

People once compared the vast and wind-rippled prairie to a sea. Here, what looks like waves are lines of brush. Most of that should be gone, as the prairie recovers. The other element to see here is the lack of diversity. The wetland in the foreground was degraded hydrologically. Some day it will be rich and flowery once again. 

Later there's a section with a lot of soon-to-be tall grasses, scattered brush, and few wildflowers. This area was bulldozed before it became forest preserve. It's been seeded, but recovery takes time. 

A few Smooth Phloxes still bloom. Notice the one in the middle, with most petals shriveled and dropped, busy making seeds. This is a classic first-quality species. But it's later hard to find those seeds perched on thin stems and leaves. 

Last photo. Thanks for joining me.
6:51 AM. Time to go to work.
A beautiful way to start the day. 

Credits:

The Forest Preserves of Cook County deserve mammoth credit for buying the land, empowering the stewards, and conducting the burns in recent years.

Laurel Ross, steward, and the volunteers of the North Branch Restoration Project deserve equally mammoth credit for detailed restoration over forty years.

Thanks to Kathy Garness and Eriko Kojima for correcting typos and editing.