One Seed at a Time
Is rebuilding a bit of presettlement landscape worth the toil?
By Sue Leaf
On a clear June day, the oak savanna at Wild River State Park is fresh with color and bird song. Buttery yellow hairy puccoon and bold magenta prairie phlox enliven the wispy grasses. Dustyoaks, singly or in clusters, provide shade. The dry trill of a savannah sparrow drifts out over the grasses. I pick my way through poison ivy, seeking something rare: wild lupine.
Wild lupine is a robust, shin-high plant with whorls of green leaves splaying out like little hands. In mid-June, its showy clusters of blue flowers are at peak bloom. Wherever they grow, a profusion of blues and violets meets the eye.
A classic savanna plant, lupine is at home on sandy soil. It thrives amid prairie grasses in the partial shade of oaks. Wild River's oak savanna was partially cleared for cultivation a century and a half ago. What remained was heavily grazed. Delectable to cattle, the once-common lupine was nearly eaten out of existence.
Oak savanna is a transition zone between forest and prairie, where trees dwindle and grasses take over. In Minnesota, it is the rarest landscape. Only about 4,000 acres, or one-tenth of 1 percent of the presettlement oak savanna remains–much of it unprotected.
As some people recall being introduced to a person who would later become a close friend, so I remember the first time I laid eyes on preserved savanna. I instantly recognized it, even while thinking I had never seen anything like it–too grassy to be a forest, but too wooded to be a grassland.
I realized that my childhood home of Roseville, Minn., had once been savanna. I had spent many days playing under the dry rustle of rusty oak leaves, in "weeds" I later learned were prairie grasses.
But the sensation of familiarity seemed too rich to be based solely on childhood memories. When I learned that humans had evolved on savanna–Africa’s savanna–and show, in psychological testing, preferences for savannalike settings, I wondered if something more–something ancient–wasn’t at work in my psyche.
As a biologist, I find all natural ecosystems brimming with intricacy and beauty. However, only the savanna fills me with emotion that I seem unable to plumb. I return to it again and again, to see what else the savanna has to say to me. I am passionate about its restoration.
The legislation that established Wild River State Park in 1973 required that its native species and landscapes be preserved and restored. A first step in restoration is to bring back the natural disturbance that created the landscape. For centuries before European settlers arrived, fire kept most trees at bay on Minnesota’s savanna. Only the prairie grasses and oaks survived cleansing burns. Often a light burn re-establishes savanna.
To decide what to burn, park managers took their cues from old trees. Bur oaks assume a burly form when they have elbow room. Where broad-crowned, heavy-limbed bur oaks grew, park managers surmised that an oak savanna once stood. Initial burns eliminated some invading species and encouraged natives, but not all of the savanna’s presettlement species reappeared. Grazing had been too intense.
In the 1980s, park staff enlisted schoolchildren and service groups to help collect native grass seeds from plants growing on Wild River’s natural remnants. Other volunteers sowed the seeds the following spring. The park began to look like a savanna, but lacked many of the colorful, jewellike native flowers that might number as many as 200 species on a pristine savanna.
Enter park naturalist Dave Crawford and his Prairie Care Project. In 1993, starting with a handful of adult volunteers, he launched a program focusing on collecting seeds from easily identifiable flowering plants. Collectors each received an illustration of the plant’s seed head and a map. Toting empty ice-cream buckets as collection pails, they went to small, undisturbed patches in the park and brought back seed–modest amounts at first, but still more than Crawford had seen from previous efforts.
Next, wondering if the program could be a teaching tool, Crawford asked two classes of elementary schoolchildren to collect blazing star seed. In 20 minutes–roughly a child’s attention span–the kids had collected $1,000 worth of seed.
Crawford knew he had a workable approach. In the 10 years since its launch, the Prairie Care Project has blossomed and now engages more than 50 adult volunteers plus hundreds of schoolchildren. Many volunteers, become species stewards and develop expertise on one or two species. We locate and observe "our" plants as they bloom, fade, and set seed. We scout out undiscovered populations in the park and collect as much seed as we can. Last fall, the total market value of the collected seed was $25,000.
Actually, the seed is priceless. Since these populations grow on this patch of earth, their seeds are uniquely fitted to restore it. You can’t buy such well-suited seeds in any store.
My charge is wild lupine, which produces seeds in midsummer. Late in June, Crawford hands me a small manila envelope weighted by several handfuls of last summer’s seeds–about $250 worth. The seeds are white, like pebbles, about the size of split peas. "Just scatter the seeds in somewhat open areas where you think lupine might grow," he tells me. "Don’t fuss too much–it should be fun."
Compulsive gardener that I am, I seek out the sandy earth of pocket-gopher mounds along the margins of woodland and grassy openings. I plant the seeds and carefully pat soil over them.
My efforts are rewarded two weeks later when the smallest of seedlings, sporting tiny green whorls of leaves, poke through the soil. The lupine population increases.
The spread of wild lupine in the park could have consequences for a butterfly with a finicky appetite. The butterfly, the Karner blue, inhabits sandy pine or oak prairies and lakeshore dunes. Wild lupine is the sole host for its voracious caterpillars. Adult butterflies are small, with delicate cerulean wings marked with orange marginal spots. Karner blues are rare and listed as state endangered.
Karner blues do not inhabit Wild River State Park; but 20 miles north at Crex Meadows Wildlife Area in Wisconsin, the butterflies have a breeding population. The habitat is right for Karner blues at Wild River, though there is no indication they were ever present. Yet, when I sow my seeds, I walk north, consciously trying to bring the park’s lupine population closer to Crex Meadows. I now watch for the flutter of blue wings, for a fleeting glimpse of azure at mud puddles or over meadows. We are waiting for a wandering Karner blue to discover this part of Minnesota.
Ah, the energy at Wild River State Park! Leaping flames tended by trained burn crews! Fifty volunteers with collection pails! More volunteers to pick and clean the collected seed over the winter! Still more volunteers to sow it in the spring!
With all the hand-collected seed gathered over a decade, Wild River State Park has gained about 200 acres of replanted prairie–200 acres in 10 years! It’s a postage stamp on the broad face of the planet. That is just stage one of re-establishing a savanna.
In stage two, oaks will be reintroduced, probably by way of acorns sprouting into seedlings, then maturing into saplings, slowly, slowly becoming larger. After the oaks will come the plants that shun the full sun of a prairie but thrive in partial shade–woodland species that provide the mix that makes a savanna unique in diversity and plant structure. None of us involved in the restoration will live to see good savanna growing in the park. It will take longer than a human lifetime.
Dry-eyed critics of such meticulous restoration claim it is little more than a nostalgic attempt to bring back a lost Eden that vanished with the invasion of European settlers. "What value is it to choose a single moment in time as the aim of a restoration effort?" ask the authors of "Carving Up the Woods," a criticism of savanna restoration efforts in northeastern Illinois in Environmental Restoration. "[It is] merely placing nature in a historical role and relegating its existence to that of an artifact, encased behind museum walls." In this case, a big museum–a state park.
Restoration ecologists counter by pointing out their efforts are directed toward supplying an environmental force–such as frequent fire–and not a specific landscape. The heroic efforts of seed collectors have an endpoint–their function, to restore plant diversity, will someday be done. Then we will see if the savanna can maintain itself under its evolutionary conditions of disturbance by fire.
Still, are we sentimentalists, grooming a personal, though wild, garden? Wouldn’t our efforts be better directed toward something really necessary for a healthy environment–such as persistently pestering our legislators to produce a sustainable energy policy, or addressing a consumer culture whose excesses cause a plethora of environmental woes?
I ponder these criticisms when I’m out in the field. Rather than picket signs, my thoughts turn to houses. The word ecology comes from the Greek word oikos, meaning "house," so I’m not completely off track.
Let’s say I have a beautifully furnished house. One day, while I’m away, someone has a wild party in the house and trashes it–carpet stained, mirrors smashed, furniture broken. It is no longer fully functional or beautiful, but the roof is intact and still keeps out the rain. Is it sentimental to think that I ought to restore the house to its former condition?
The answer depends on the direction I am looking, forward or backward. If my aim in restoration is to re-create the house to the last detail in order to relive happy moments–birthdays, Christmases–of the past, then it might be a sentimental effort.
But what if my aim is to enrich my future life–to re-create beauty and functionality and to provide a worthy inheritance for my children? Is that sentimental?
What about the small furnishings? A china figurine–well, I really wouldn’t need that. But a cell phone on the nightstand, to use in case of fire? That might save the house.
Like all analogies, mine has limitations. But the small items that might or might not be important are interesting, because ecologists will tell you that we don’t understand any ecosystem well enough to determine whether we can get along without all the details. We know that ecosystems with a high level of biodiversity recover more quickly from disturbance, such as drought; but we don’t know which species are essential to the ecosystem, and which ones won’t be missed if they go extinct.
This lack of knowledge makes our efforts at Wild River seem less like paging through an heirloom photo album and more like sitting at a roulette table, trying to calculate how much we can afford to lose.
In my gloomy moments, I wonder if the charge of sentimentalism is, in truth, a refusal to come to terms with the loss of North America’s wealth of life, and a rejection of any guilt in our collective abuse of the land. Yet, when I am at work on the nascent savanna, gloom and guilt do not exist. What I see is fresh and bountiful–big bluestem grass dripping with seed, dried lupine pods swollen with promise. The earth is incredibly lavish in its production of new life. Taking my cue from nature, I see that each new spring brings possibility. The hope it engenders ties us to the bountiful oaks adorned with May’s flowers, to every savannah sparrow pioneering restored land.
The wild lupine at Wild River State Park is not the same as the conspicuous lupine seen along the North Shore. The shoreline lupines are a garden variety brought into Minnesota from the West. Seeds collected from these garden escapees should not be planted in natural areas.
Sue Leaf, Center City, is currently at work on a book about Minnesota’s oak savanna.