I’m sitting here at the computer as the wind howls outside waiting for updates on a potential snowstorm tomorrow. Our place isn’t nearly as remote as the farm where I grew up, and where my restorations are, but it’s still on a township road 15 miles from town. One can feel isolated when the weather is tough, and because of my history of ER visits (about 10 in the last 3-4 years), it makes my wife nervous. We’ve talked for several years about moving, at least for the winter, to avoid that risk.

Three and a half years ago we bought a house in the Twin Cities for our daughter to live in, in a first ring suburb called Roseville, about a half mile from the city limits of St. Paul. She lived in it until last October, when she and her new husband moved to Orange County, California for job opportunities. So now we have an empty house in a well maintained area that we are doing some work on. Originally this was preparatory to renting it our while we decided what the long term plan for the house was. Now, however, we are considering using it as our winter home. Everything we need, including a couple medical providers that I already use, is within 3-4 miles, meaning city traffic is less of an issue than one would think. There is one very large barrier, at least for me, however; what the hell do I do with my time in a city?

One thing I have already done is to start a relationship with the Minnesota Land Trust (MLT) as a volunteer monitor of easement properties. That doesn’t help me much in the winter as monitoring is a summer activity, and the properties so far are in Western Minnesota, closer to our South Dakota farm than to the Twin Cities, but it’s an entry into relationships I wouldn’t otherwise have and to properties in conservation ownership. One of those properties, about halfway between, or two hours from each, is a terribly interesting property owned by Ann Gustafson. Its got a house, a couple cottages, some small pastures that she rents to a neighboring organic beef producer. some pollinator plantings, a small orchard and perhaps 200 acres of overgrown oak woodland. Her son, Frank, who is in law school, is engaged in the Herculean task of attempting to reclaim the woods from many, many acres of European buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica) by going out day after day and using a brush cutter and a chain saw to clear areas during the summer.

Well, it’s pretty freaking impressive. This property is the legacy of Ann’s dad, Wally, who was a lawyer in Willmar (as Ann is), a legislator, and obviously a very cool guy. They love their property, want to honor that legacy by doing right by the land, and have several projects there. In my eyes, however, they’re lacking a strategic plan, and that’s most obvious in the buckthorn project. If they are able to eradicate buckthorn from substantial areas of their property, they will have a large empty biotic space that will need to be filled. Is it going to be filled by buckthorn, by annual weeds, by some other invasive shrub? Or can we fill that space with something that will provide some ecosystem services to contribute to the world? The three pillars of savanna restoration seem to be removing unwanted vegetation, planting species adapted to the partial shade of a savanna and maintaining with continued shrub/invasive species removal and fire. What specific combination of those three activities will make this property a shining light?

MLT has a small crew dedicated to restoration of landscapes, so I have attempted to put them in contact with Ann and Frank, but the way of the world is that everyone is always very busy. There are always limitations in time, money and energy. If you go back 150 years this wasn’t oak woodland or forest, it was probably oak savanna. One hundred miles west where I live there was prairie, not oak savanna, so my experience is less than thin, it is translucent; I needed the backup of MLT, which I wasn’t confident I could get. I have been pondering this as the wind blows and the temperature and dry air keeps me from living outside.

Then, two weeks ago, I saw an invitation to join the virtual annual meeting of The Prairie Enthusiasts, a land trust who is primarily engaged in the care for and rehabilitation of prairies intertwined with oak savannas in southern Wisconsin and southeast Minnesota. The theme for about fifteen speakers centered around the restoration and rehabilitation of oak savannas with the title: “Inspired by Resilience”. Perfect! Even though I hate Zoom meetings I made myself watch about half the presentations. I’m not sure that it was “resilience” that did it, but I am definitely inspired now. Oak savannas are not scattered oak trees with grass in between. They are not even scattered oaks with prairie in between. They are a true hybrid; an amalgam, that was stabilized by fires that kept the weedy shrubs from taking over. Their forb diversity has aspects of both oak woodland and tallgrass prairie, and as such, a functioning savanna is more diverse than either. The conference was capped by a presentation by Dr. Doug Tallamy, author of “Nature’s Best Hope”, a bestselling book whose main thesis is the good that could be done by suburban homeowners planting native species, particularly oaks, because of the deep symbiotic relationships oaks have with life forms from bears to countless insects to a myriad of species in the soil. I have a new cause. complimentary to my present love of prairie restoration, and accessible from the Twin Cities. I need to become an oak savanna restoration practitioner.

Before I can do that I need to learn a lot more about the biome, and I have started by pulling out my old A. W. Kuchler map of the “Potential Natural Vegetation of the United States”. I remember being interested by the significant area of the Midwest that was labeled a mosaic of Oak-Hickory forest and Tallgrass Prairie, and assumed that was how the oak savanna region would be designated. But, no, there was a separate designation for oak savanna, perhaps 10000 square miles in Wisconsin and Minnesota, with the two dominant and presumably diagnostic genera being oaks and bluestem grasses. Interestingly, this conflicts with some speakers at the conference, who talked about the partial shade of the savanna giving an advantage to C3 grasses such as needlegrasses and ryegrasses over C4 grasses like big bluestem and indiangrass. One speaker took it a step farther and emphasized the primacy of forbs, both prairie and woodland species, over even the grasses. And multiple speakers referenced the necessity of fire to providing a veneer of stability to a very dynamic system. The longevity and the aggressive rooting of oaks will otherwise eventually prevail and oak savanna will tend towards oak woodland, or often to oaks with a very messy shrub understory such as Ann’s property.

So that’s the big idea on one way to integrate me into urban life. There are many resources, both human and other, that I can access in the Twin Cities, most not too far from where our house is, to learn about and create restoration plans for oak savanna. This could be for Ann and Frank or for another property. Looking at the websites of the many conservation organizations based in and near the Twin Cities I see multiple references to oak savanna restoration projects, so it might be as simple as volunteering with the right group to facilitate my education. If anything of substance happens regarding this idea I will check back in. There will likely be more ideas, but this has given me hope and invigorated the anticipation of a new winter home.