After a prolonged period during which I was either traveling to Chicago, in the Twin Cities working on the house we own there (which is happily now rented out for a few months), or sick, I was finally able to get out to the restoration to walk around. I had some seed that had been stratifying in the refrigerator for a couple months to get spread and really needed the opportunity to just get out to look around. This has been an abysmal spring, and with my other issues, I have basically missed it. How many more springs will I feel physically able to walk in the prairies, I wonder? The mind goes to dark places during a prolonged illness, and I was feeling my time is short and precious. Your time is short and precious as well, by the way, even if you are a strong young millenial in the prime of your physical life. Opportunities must be grasped and throttled, or manfactured from the air, but they are there and need to be used. Here are a few things I saw today.

A little irony in the new groundpum find, as I was tossing out some groundplum seed when I came across this one. I found about 12-15 plants last year, primarily across a long eroded ridge just south of the little hill where I found this one. Legumes are gold, and I love my groundplums, so finding a new one is always a happy event. So far this spring I have found 50 or more. This is one of the species that I have worked at most diligently in the restoration, and I really hope to establish an actual population. Compatriots are as close as a hundred yards away in the nearby pasture, so I hope that cross pollination will occur. These are blooming a couple days earlier than the groundplums in my relict prairies because of less competition from a grass sod, but I think this is a long-lived species, so there is time for love to find a way.

Most of the violets in my native prairies are Nuttall’s violets (Viola nuttallii), a yellow blooming species, but I wanted to add some violets to my restoration to provide food for regal frittilary butterfly larvae, and it is very difficult to buy the seed of Nuttall’s violets. Thus I bought some prairie violet. I have them growing here and there. I hope they spread, as they tend to be pretty ubiquitious in other prairies in the area.

It was a big surprise when I started finding clumps of pussytoes in the restoration. Seed is expensive, and hard to gather, so I was only able to get a little seed out there, but wandering around I regularly come upon plants.

This is a big, happy success! I had identified several pasque plants vegetatively the past couple years, but this is the first bloom I have seen in my restoration. Three years ago we were able to gather a great deal of seed and I literally spent hours picking out seeds a few at a time and releasing them into the wind across the hilltops of the west half of the restoration. Pasque is pretty conservative, in that you only really find it in relict prairies; it doesn’t seed itself into tame pastures. I have read that it is very difficult to get it to grow from seed, but I guess you get lucky sometimes, and I am very happy to have found it. This is shaping up to be a good year for seed collection of this species, so I hope to get a bunch to spread on the new restoration.

Prairie smoke is not uncommon in the adjacent prairie, and I know several other prairies where I can find it, but I have never been able to gather much. So, just as with the prairie violet, I broke down the second year of the restoration and bought some. It’s very difficult to seed, as the feathery awns weave themselves into a tight ball, so once again several tedious hours were spent wandering across the restoration trying to pull a few seeds loose at a time to release into a breeze. I have found quite a few in my limited opportunities to get out to the restoration this spring, perhaps a hundred or so that are blooming now.

Biotic space is the theme for this post, and the clearest example is what a wet fall and early spring has done on some of the bare areas remaining on the worst eroded hillsides. Moss has found its way to those soils and is making use of the sunlight and water. Nutrients are obviously very limiting, but mosses have the ability to make do with very little. Usually, mosses are thought of as growing in shady woods, but in this case the excess moisture of the past several months have given this moss the opportunity to grow. I hope to follow these areas through the course of the summer to see how they respond to heat and dessication later. As interesting as the moss is, I would prefer to see blue grama colonizing and spreading to provide more erosion control. On the other hand, I should perhaps withhold judgement and enjoy observing the moss.

All these plants were found in areas where there is still open space to colonize. At least that is my assumption, but we only see what is above the ground, and in these very droughty soils the real competition might be below the ground. Today I was also planting seedlings that I received from Dr. Lora Perkins at South Dakota State University (SDSU). I brought her the seed from my relict prairies, and she has incorporated it into her work on native plant propagation at SDSU and in return was kind enough to trade me back a bunch of seedlings of several species. We will see how much biotic space there really is. I accept that I may be wasting the effort, but I hope to see some more prairie turnips out there in the future.

How much more biotic space do I have, personally? how many more openings can I insert myself into? It hasn’t been a great spring to feel very confident as to the future, so I am trying very hard to concentrate my efforts, enjoy some opportunities, and generally to make productive use of what little energy I can gather. Onward!

Postscript: Two weeks after writing this I was out planting some plugs of a couple species and realized that I had failed to add another obvious response to empty space in a planting. Many plants engage in colonial, or clonal growth. They send rhizomes out to scout out possibilities. Last summer was hot and dry until August 10 or so, after which all hell broke loose meteorologically. Any plant that could make use of the rain in September and October would be able to make substantial growth and gain an advantage on plants that were done with the year, or simply grow into the empty space. Here are a couple examples that I came across, but there are more.

The common threads are that in each case there was a seedling that developed over the past two or three years into a plant that had sufficient photosynthate to make a lot of rhizomatous growth. Roots with the ability to form nodes with meristematic tissue (think stem cells) grew laterally. Those nodes then started to send their own roots down into the soil and formed a shoot that came through the surface and begins to make its own food. If you pull or dig out any of those shoots you will find it has its own crown and root system, but that it is also tethered to a lateral root that goes back to the original plant (or an older shoot from earlier rhizomatous growth. Nothing is free; putting lots of energy into the rhizomes means that many or most of these shoots may not send flowers up. The food goes into growth under the surface, instead. However, if the year is kind there is the potential for a great number of flowering stalks trying to make seed. We will see what the year brings.