On Helping One’s Mother

by Robert Kellum

For most of us there comes a time when we are called, in no uncertain terms, to assist our mother. If the Reader is like the many who take this responsibility seriously, then you can appreciate how becoming associated with such unbridled virtue is prescriptive medicine for a guilty conscience. Such was my call, last November, when several others and myself set about assisting Mother Nature. We were harvesting seed from native prairie remnants for use in creating a seed bank to be located at Lake Hudson State Recreation Area. Working in partnership, Michigan State Parks and the Raisin Cluster of The Southeast Michigan Stewardship Network are establishing a seed plot where bulk quantities of local genotype prairie grass seed can be harvested for use in restorations throughout the area. Fundamental to this project is finding and harvesting local seed.

Few fall avocations have offered me more satisfaction than learning to recognize prairie grasses while walking through remote natural areas. Armed only with budding identification skills and a tip as to where to look, we found and harvested several varieties of grass where long retired farm fields were giving way to resurgent woodlands. If virtue is its own reward, and harvesting this seed felt so compensated, then I can only conclude the project’s virtue.

The growing understanding of pre-settlement vegetation suggests that the tallgrass savannas of southern Michigan were distinct from the immense treeless prairies that once dominated further west. Michigan’s prairies were created by an ebb and flow dynamic at the interface between western prairies and the no less dominant eastern forests. “The prairie-forest transition was most likely a shifting mosaic of prairie, oak savanna, and oak forest, the boundaries of each determined by recent fire history and short-term climate fluctuations, with frequent fires and dry periods favoring prairie and savanna over forest” . Always vacillating, our prairies provided an evolving habitat for enumerable varieties of local flora and fauna.

Reading about prairie restoration while remaining grounded in first hand observation and experience, suggests that rekindling pre-settlement ecosystems is as much art as science. Restoration is a young but quickly evolving discipline born of a perceived need to steward what remains of the vast diversity that once blanketed our landscape. It is also a creative endeavor that relies on one’s intuition and sense of wonder to deduce the essence of what has often been hopelessly altered by both intended and unintended human intervention. We cannot afford right or wrong judgments in our approach to ecosystems restoration; it is instead paramount that we embrace nature’s ever-accommodating spirit of forgiveness.

For me, last fall’s “wonderlust” was an introduction to that spirit that I would recommend to anyone so inclined. How better, I ask the Reader, to honor nature than to so directly assist her genetic imperatives and compound her endless cycles?

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