Prairie Lilies: an attempt at the impossible

Surrounded here by shooting star, lead plant, dropseed, and more, the lily's beauty touches us, and we're inspired yet more by its role as an indicator of a top quality ecosystem. 
Is this rare plant too hard to restore. It needs high-quality associates. Maybe after many more decades Somme would have sufficient quality for it.

But sometimes "the impossible" just turns out to take a lot of work. In this case: fun work.

One prairie lily with two stems and three flowers grows with spiderwort, leadplant, dropseed,
Indian grass, flowering spurge, and so many others. In 2026, Eriko Kojima popped deer exclusion cages on 78 of these beauties in Somme Prairie Grove. 

Many of us are deeply inspired to see them - now widely spread throughout these 85 acres. This lily's dramatic success, despite dire predictions, has been an especially satisfying and deeply felt adventure for their major steward, Eriko Kojima. She does not feel heroic about it, but normal, in her humble way.  

The attitude is well expressed by this excerpt from a poem by Marge Piercy (with the compelling name "To Be of Use"). 

The people I love the best

jump into work head first

and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.

They seem to become natives of that element.

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.

Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.

But the thing worth doing well done

has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.

The pitcher cries for water to carry

and a person for work that is real.

When Eriko began at Somme, eleven years ago, we were planting out lily bulbs. We had collected seed at Somme's one small Grade A remnant prairie. The Chicago Botanic Garden had propagated those seeds and returned to us little, young lily bulbs. Yet we'd done some of that before, and not much had come of it. We'd see an occasional lily with one flower, and then we'd never see that plant again. For one thing, the deer were eating them before they got a chance to become well established. We knew they needed protection. But we had not the people nor the hours. And perhaps we could devote only so much time to a species that our mentor Dr. Betz had said could not grow in this fairly new restoration.   

Eriko stepped up. In her words, 

"It's a very basic job. You just have to cage them. I'm Japanese. We very much admire diligence and persistence, qualities not so much respected in America these days. Here we prefer the rugged individual, the dramatic gesture, the big discovery. Good craftsmanship is a few pegs down. It's not glamorous. But if you relish doing good work with a positive attitude, it's a big part of what makes life good." 

Nor was there anything single-minded about it. While being parent to the lilies, Eriko was also caring for many other species, coordinating the Somme seed harvest, the website, the schedule, welcoming new people, organizing "field seminars", and so much more. For much success at Somme, her wisdom, skill, and commitment get much of the credit.  

For years we needed to cage Somme's fringed gentians. But we did it, harvested a massive lot of seeds, broadcast them around the site, and these delicate  beauties picked their places and today are widespread in areas without cages. Big patches get eaten; perhaps it was always so. 

Some species that have received intensive care like the fringed gentian are annuals or biennials, thriving on various kinds of disturbances. They follow trouble. But the prairie lily is an upstanding and long-term component of the richest prairies and savannas. Similar plants include prairie violet, white prairie clover, yellow stargrass, violet wood sorrel, Leiberg's panic grass, and prairie gentian. All of them needed special care, they got it, and all are dramatically increasing. 

In each case, it has taken a lot of seed to prime the pump. For the prairie lily we got those seeds from the two small areas where this rare lily is original at Somme Prairie but only after many years of Eriko carefully protecting each plant from emergence in June to harvest time in September. Early in the year, overpopulated deer eat flowers and whole plants. When pods form, meadow voles cut the stems, pull them down, and eat the pods. So large-mesh deer cages and low, small-mesh vole exclusion cages were needed. 

Early in the year, Eriko starts to cage them. "Finding marked plants when their fat stems are just a inch out of the ground is really fun to do." But it's hard to know how tall they'll be. In this case, the lilies busted out ... and will soon likely be eaten, unless Eriko trades this for a taller cage, a tricky process that can crimp entangled stems and damage vegetation, including the lilies. So she'll probably install a second story cage on top of this one.  

Then Eriko arranged for crack plant propagator Rob Sulski to grow increasing numbers of bulbs in his back yard. Volunteer steward crews planted them widely in the highest quality areas, all around Somme Prairie Grove. But individual planted plants are too much like a garden, not enough like recovered nature. Would they spread by seed?   

This year, we finally saw it. Lilies were blooming in places where we knew we had never planted bulbs but had broadcast seed mixes that included the lily. Does that mean we finally have sure success? Perhaps, or perhaps not. 

How many are there? We don't know. A healthy lily doesn't necessarily bloom every year. Especially if the plant is eaten or damaged, the bulb may decide to take a year off, just put up some leaves, not too tall, and photosynthesize for a year or two until it feels it has enough energy to gamble on blooming and reproduction. So the number of lilies we see in bloom in a year may represent a small part of the population. Eriko has started more intensive monitoring. 

Unlike with the gentian and many other species, we still feel the need to cage prairie lilies to protect them from both voles and deer. A population of at least 78 plants is promising to be sure, but perhaps not enough to stand on their own yet. It's a glorious thing to watch. Stop by in late June 2027, and you're likely to see many. 

Endnotes

Endnote 1

See that lily back there, 15 feet from the trail? Here's a request. If you walk the Somme paths, and the first lily you see is twenty feet away from the path, consider this: There are another 50 to 100 plant species between you and the lily. If you want to take a closer look, keep on walking and wait until you discover one near the trail. In this case you'd be trampling prairie violets, yellow stargrasses, and shooting stars that bloomed earlier along with prairie clovers, prairie gentians, and various orchids that will bloom later. Some of them would recover from trampling, but all, especially the most conservative ones, would suffer. Might you not feel a bit bad about doing that unnecessarily? 

Photographers trample wide paths to them. (Really, plant photographers, do plants mean nothing to you before they bloom? ... or while they're trying to set seed?)

Endnote 2

Does it seem like this post is too much about Eriko? For the prairie lily, it has to be. She did 95% of the work. Yet credit also goes to Cook County Forest Preserve staff and contractors. And the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission and the Illinois Natural History Survey. Lisa Musgrave did the initial exclusion caging on the fringed gentians and later took on the prairie white-fringed orchid, which deserves a post of its own. Many individuals have enjoyed stepping up to nurture the ecological and human communities here. Folks high on the list these days include volunteer stewards Christos Economou, Rebeccah Hartz, Dan Delaney, Estelle Ure, Linda Masters, Stephanie Place, Ali Fakhari, Lisa Musgrave, Joe Handworker, Amy Broussard, Paula Kessler, Mick Dart, Sharon Rosenzweig, Jonathan Sabbath, Audrey and Claire Avril ... and the list could go on. 

Thanks to Christos Economou and Eriko Kojima for helpful edits. 

Three Historical Tidbits

About early restoration strategies, grade A prairies, and fire.

Linda Masters was looking through old files and found the documents that inspired Tidbit 1 and 3.

Tidbit 1

This drawing by Bobby Sutton (or actually, a xerox from his notebook) captures some features of the early work of what was then called the North Branch Prairie Project. First, we were authorized to girdle trees in degraded savannas whenever they were too thick for savanna seed to grow underneath. Second, when we broadcast seed, we always raked it into the soil (as we'd been told to do, but which in time - by experiment - we learned wasn't needed with fall planting). Third, the bag of bagels reminds us that bagels were long our only workday snack, and the site steward bought them, on the way, that morning. 

Tidbit 2

The following three photos of the best Grade A section of Somme Prairie remind us of what we faced in our work to recover this "very high quality" prairie:

Most of it was degraded. Dense dogwood brush had blotted out large areas. Note above that fire had killed back the edge of this dogwood clump. Both fire and cutting were needed. 

The "two acres" of Grade A actually consisted of four small openings in the brush, divided from each other by the shade of dense trees and shrubs.

But the highest quality parts of the middle inspired us to work and invent as hard as we could. This beautiful rare nature deserved to survive.

Tidbit 3

Controlled burns were little understood by the outside world at that time. Getting approval to burn was not easy. But the system was developing. 

We needed to coordinate with the State, the County, and local fire departments. The burning permit from Cook County was especially quaint. Under "Method of Extinguishment" someone had typed "fire extinguisher." 

Although we had Forest-Preserve-wide approval for these burn, we were also asked to collaborate with the local staff. Before Cook County Superintendent of Conservation Roland Eisenbeis had started depending on us, the local Maintenance Superintendents had been the staff that took care of land outside of the Nature Centers. But mostly they mowed lawns and emptied garbage cans. They had no scientific staff. And even the Conservation Department had few staff experienced with burns. So once the Nature Preserves Commission hired me, the Forest Preserve staff decided to let me take on the work and responsibility for Nature Preserve burns. Not that there weren't bumps in the road. There were many.

This is the record of my conversation with the Superintendent of Maintenance of the Calumet region one beautiful morning.

 

Me: I just wanted to let you know we’d be burning Zanders Woods Nature Preserve this morning.”

 

Him: No, you can’t do that. It’s too windy.

 

Me: Oh, I’m sorry, I wasn’t asking you to authorize it. That’s all been taken care of though the Superintendent of Conservation. 

 

Him: Yeah, but you can’t burn today.

 

Me: Yes, I want to be clear that you don’t have to worry about trouble. I’m just notifying you. The crew is all here and finishing up the firebreaks. This is crucial, as you know, for the health of the Nature Preserve.

 

Him: It’s still no.

 

Me: Yes, I’ll be sure to tell the Superintendent that you have no responsibility for it. We’ll keep it very safe and make sure not to cause any extra work for you.

 

Him: Well, I guess we’ll just have to play it by the ears.

 

Do I come across as disrespectful or "difficult" in this? I certainly wouldn't talk with staff like that today. But back then, changes were needed, and when there had been conflict between Maintenance and Conservation, normally it was the powerful patronage haven of Maintenance that won out. I was being supported to facilitate change as best I could. 

And so, on this day, about two hundred acres of endangered-species-covered ground had its first burn in years (perhaps since the Potawatomi burned it?). What the Forest Preserve staff called Zanders Woods was called Thornton Lansing Road Nature Preserve by the Commission, and both agencies had responsibility for it. Bit by bit the Maintenance folks increasingly understood that the Conservation superintendent needed to be listened to about Nature Preserves. And as the burns proved safe, the prairie volunteers and the Maintenance supervisors actually got to like each other. Expert, hard-working, and dedicated volunteers deserve respect, and often get it.