The theme of this short post is one I have hit before. Life is on fire. Every day, no, every minute, is a new and precious thing., and you need to be out in the world to see life or you might miss it. For instance; Grooved yellow flax (Linum sulcatum) is an annual which only germinates and grows with appropriate early summer rain. Rain has been hard to come by in June the past several years, but I was fortunate enough to receive a couple rains in late June and early July this year, After three years where I saw very few flax blooms, this was what lay before me when I visited the prairie in mid-July. As soon as I crested the last hill before this prairie the vista was streaked with hills of pale yellow separating the deeper green valleys below.

Though there are obviously many flax plants to gather it is a frustrating process. the bouquet above is perhaps 250 plants picked while crawling over the hill on my hands and knees, and the end result is below in the small plastic bowl. Much of what is in the bowl is not seed, but the stems and hulls of the little flax bolls. Still, there are a lot of seeds there, and the little guys are very prolific when given an opportunity. Thus, I will try to use the best chance I have had in my five years of seed gathering and get back out to gather more. It obviously has a great ability to self seed and the seed has some longevity, so a little might go a long way.

There is a very clear pattern for many species to bloom and set seed in profusion one year, and then take a year or two off. For an annual like yellow flax the signal is pretty clearly the proper timing for rain. Yellow flax is a plant of dry country, and evolutionary forces have “taught” it to respond to the appropriate precipitation event. I don’t know if the stimulus is the same for my next example of a good reason to get out regularly to look around. Three weeks before I took the picture of the flax, about the same time I ended up in the hospital for dehydration, I drove up to the pasture that adjoins the prairie with the flax and saw this.

It’s not unusual to see a few cactus blooms on my hills, but I cannot remember them ever blooming in such profusion, with multiple blooms on many plants. What is even more unusual is to see so many of the blooms pollinate and produce fruit. Like many plants, cactus has more than one way to reproduce, though its method of clonal reproduction is unusual. When conditions are good it will make new balls, until there may be a group of 20 or 30 joined together in a cluster. Then, a disturbance such as a cow (or historically a buffalo) will dislodge some, which can then move to a new spot nearby to start a new cluster. I am propagating some in that manner in my restoration, having found a few which the cattle dislodged. That’s all well and good for me, but a cactus won’t move very far in this manner as no other animal will pick up one the spiny little bastards to move it. They will, however move the fruits, which have many seeds embedded in a jelly. When the fruits are ripe they dislodge very easily, so one can imagine them falling out where a mouse, gopher or ground squirrel would pick them up to take them back to consume in a safe spot, and the seed likely passes on through to germinate wherever they might defecate. I’m a lot bigger and uglier than the rodent, or perhaps rabbit, that is the normal partner, but I have several new gravel hills where we will see if we can establish colonies.

As always, I wonder how important an individual species is, and simply have to shrug my shoulders. I am trying to do a good thing here: environmentally, socially, economically and whatever other descriptive word that ends in “ally” you want to fill in; but ultimately I have to be humble enough to realize I don’t have answers to many of my questions and simply please myself. And it will please me greatly to find pincushion cactus in my restoration in the future. So it goes.

The final topic is one I give a lot of thought to. While I have stated that one of the most important outcomes of these restorations is to expand the populations and range of my native forbs, I spread seed of many species which I have never seen on my prairies. Below is a species I have never seen in any prairie around here, flat-topped aster. There was a discussion at a field day I attended recently where experienced conservation professionals were asking this of each other. To paraphrase: “I can buy this native species that really isn’t found near this site for 10% of the cost of the close relative that is. Am I wrong to do that? Or does accomplishing my goals for ecosystem services by getting a good population of the cheaper species outweigh the worries that I might be missing something?” I hope that gets the dilemma right. The consensus was that we simply don’t know what the right choice is, so go ahead and do something. Either choice is better than another corn or soybean field, or even a field of native grass without wildflowers. In my own restoration I have had the luxury of having my cake as well as eating it, and have often spent the money on the expensive species, as well as adding some species that are not found nearby. I generally went to the range maps, and if it was found within a county or two from mine would use it. Most prairies, even good relict prairies, likely have lost a lot of species from pre-settlement times, and it may have been here 125 years ago.

The “surprise” aspect of the flat-topped aster is that it is a mesic species and my site is mostly xeric. I found a couple plants two years ago on droughty soils and put them on my species list, but saw none last year. I assumed they may have succumbed to drought and I wasted my efforts by being careless where I spread them. This week I found several growing in appropriate sites near the drainage that runs through the restoration, and I was very pleased to see them.

The related question is the number of plants that are needed to create a population that can support the proper pollinator(s) and have enough genetic variability to avoid inbreeding effects. I don’t know the answer to that, though I am confident it is a lot more than the 4 or 5 that I saw. I will continue to think about that in the future with an eye towards perhaps augmenting the populations of some species attempting to cross the threshold to viability in the long term. For now, I am happy to have seen these.

With that I will close this post, and see what I find the next time I go to the restoration. October is a wonderful time to be alive!