Perhaps the most gratifying aspect of my prairie restoration journey has been the education I have received. I have learned a great deal about my prairies while gathering seed and while trying to understand the native prairies I am trying to model in my restoration. I clearly have a different relationship with those prairies than I did before. The revelation was just how freaking rudimentary my knowledge has been and still is. Creating the restoration has meant that I have looked much more closely at many plant species I thought I knew well, and learned about many species I had never noticed. That process obviously begins with simple identification, but continues with phenology, site fidelity and the plant and insect associates that each species live with.

An example: I have been aware that a penstemon grew in my prairies for a long time, but had never looked closely enough to identify the species or even notice its abundance. Last spring, now with an eye to creating my restoration model, I noticed a profusion of small white-bloomed penstemons across the tops of many of the most xeric hills. The white penstemon (Penstemon albidus) is one which I had never noticed in popular plant guides and which I have yet to find available from native seed purveyors. Pasqueflowers (Anemone patens) were also blooming on the same sites, but with little else having made significant growth, the 8-12” tall blooms stood out, even from a distance.

Then, two weeks later, I noticed a resurgence of penstemon blooms, but now with a hint of lavender or violet (I am a bit color challenged; not color blind, just color clueless). I soon realized I had a second species, slender penstemon (Penstemon gracilis). Both species grew in the same sites. They were usually in close association on the gravel hills with an entire suite of early blooming forbs: fringed puccoon (Lithospermum incisum), milkwort (Polygala verticillata), bastard toadflax (Comandra umbellata), yellow sundrops (Calylophus serrulata), a chickweed (probably Cerastium arvense) and yellow flax (Linum sulcatum), none of which I had ever looked closely at or identified before. Added to the early blooming species I did know such as ragwort (Packera plattensis), groundplum milkvetch (Astragalus crassicarpus), prairie violet (Viola pedatifida), prairie smoke (Geum triflorum) and pasqueflower, and the hills were a riot of color from April 25-June 15.

Okay, so to call it a “riot” of color might be exaggerating, but to me it was still eye-opening. These were hills I had walked over for 50 years but had never seen before. Over the past 40 years my work has occupied so much of my time during the late spring and early summer that I had spent little time in my prairies. I would always go out to see the pasqueflowers emerge in late April, and by the time I turned around it seemed to be late July. Seeing the variety of blooms in May on these soil-less hills made me giddy. I have done some reading on Buddhist teachings and the concept of mindfulness has resonated with me. In the late 60’s the phrase you would see was, “Be here, now.” In the movie “Wayne’s World” Garth says to Wayne as he moons over an expensive guitar, “Live in the now, man!” Same concept, different contexts. I had been a really crappy Buddhist, not showing sufficient attention to my surroundings. The number of species that I didn’t know on one gravel hilltop, most not taller than a twelve ounce water bottle, gobsmacked me, as the British say. Even the ubiquity of prairie junegrass (Koelaria macrantha), a species that I thought I knew well, was a surprise. Parasitic plants such as bastard toadflax and downy painted cup (Castilleja sessiflora) were not in my purview, though it seems obvious in retrospect that parasitism is a reasonable strategy on a droughty, infertile soil. Another obvious strategy was investing energy in seed rather than roots. An extensive, deep root system really pays off in drought when you have soil for the roots to explore and exploit. When there is really no soil it is reasonable to live fast, die young and leave a lot of seed to grow in the empty spaces on the thin, gravelly soils.

This brings me back to my penstemons. More so than many plants they grow in patches. Often that occurs with rhizomatous growth, plants investing in clonal growth. However when I pulled plants of both penstemon species I found a shallow, fibrous root system, not rhizomes. The common thread, particularly for the white penstemon, was fidelity to extremely droughty soils. Some areas hardly deserve to be called soil, the soil forming processes have modified the gravelly parent material so little. I think that these penstemons turn spring moisture into a lot of viable seed, seed dispersal be damned. Life is fine if seeds drop right next to the parent plants on to the exposed mineral soil of these sites. The parents aren’t very competitive and may not live much longer anyway. This made me hesitant to gather a large percentage of the seed pods as it might affect the survival of the penstemon patch. Perhaps some of the seeds are dispersed by seed eating birds whose gizzards fail to grind all the seeds. This is all obviously speculative, but I think those two penstemons, again, particularly the white, use the strategy of an annual to thrive on a very tough site.

Beauty on a hilltop

Life is ephemeral

Continuity may not mean that I myself continue

But oh, to wave in a cool wind on a spring day

And build a future for another May

Am I talking about the penstemons or creating a metaphor for an old farm boy? A bit of both perhaps.