September 2019

A friend of ours came to visit, having seen our farm in years past when we’d leased it out for the growing of corn, wheat, sorghum sudan grass, sesame, and milo. He knew of our prairie project, but hadn’t seen it yet. When he saw our fields he remarked to his wife, “Is that what Melinda and Robert wanted their fields to look like?”

To the untrained eye the prairie, nascent or mature, looks a lot like an unmown, neglected field. Part of that impression comes from our being accustomed to the manicured lawns of the city, or the orderly products of agriculture.

Our concept of what is beautiful requires some adjustment. Willa Cather wrote, “Anybody can love the mountains, but it takes a soul to love the prairie.” The prairie’s beauty is not found in the imposed order of human effort, but in the living, breathing, order of an ecosystem that abounds in diversity, insect and animal life, color, texture, and structure.

To quote Melinda’s favorite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins (“Inversnaid”),

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Late summer and fall is the time for the tall grasses to make their inflorescence/seedhead, which makes them much easier for us non-experts to identify. We have been looking for the Big Four of the tall-grass prairies to show themselves. Now all four have done so. Many of the hundreds of bunches of grass will not mature enough to make seed this year, but enough have done so to encourage us that what we’d hoped for is actually happening. We’ve also seen Sideoats Grama, Lovegrass, and Eastern Gamagrass.