Yes, There are Trees in Kansas and Nebraska

People sometimes ask how anyone can stomach driving across the plains through boring "fly-over" states such as Kansas or Nebraska.  They envision long, straight, flat stretches of land with nothing but corn extending into the horizon, perhaps at sometime replaced by open grass range.  While I could humorously make the claim that they are missing the forest for the trees and ignoring the majesty of the open grasslands and incredibly huge sky, such places are often better defended by stating that trees actually do exist in nearly all of non-tundra North America.  No, they might not be towering cathedral pillars as they can get to be in the northwestern or eastern forests, but they are hardly shrubs either.
 

This and below were taken at Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve near Council Grove, Kansas.

Each of the plains states and provinces, in fact, have arboreal symbols, some of which tend to surprise people.  Oklahoma's state tree is the Eastern Redbud (Cercis Canadensis), while chilly, open North Dakota's is the American Elm (Ulmus Americana), a tree of great size and commonly a beloved landscape plant throughout eastern North America.  Kansas and Nebraska offer the more common Eastern Cottonwood (Populus Deltoides) which can be found anywhere on the Great Plains that enough water has been provided for the plant to get its start.  Many historic routes and modern highways, in fact, are never far from the reassuring marching line of cottonwoods rising above the grasses and willows as signs of readily available water running along with them.

While the Trans-Canada highway, I-90, 70, and 40 make a clear shot across the grasslands, I-80 stays with the cottonwoods in much of Nebraska as it strikes west along the Platte River.  (See: "Green Is My Platte Valley").  Most towns spring up on the horizon with more trees than buildings in site, even on the high plains.  The truth is that there is enough groundwater and precipitation here that a planted tree can thrive quite well.  Nebraska, in fact, has quite national forests enough to green up the map as much as the eastern states can get painted over.  Grasses are the reason such trees can usually thrive in the first place, their roots being excellent retention agents for water and responsible for making the soil of the plains so workable to begin with.

While the trees do diminish naturally the farther west one goes, to the point of almost negligible forest cover in the rain-shadow of the Rockies, river courses and even slight sharp rises (such as bluffs) will feature some sort of tree cover.  In something of a parley of the trees, east and west invisibly meet in this great division point of North American botany.  Cottonwoods, willows, elms, and cedars follow river courses while they are seemingly watched by western pines and junipers atop river bluffs.

Another Savanna Post, or What Did We Have and What Have We Done With It?

And yet again another exciting post from Jim McCormac over at Ohio Birds and Biodiversity.

http://jimmccormac.blogspot.com/2012/07/pearl-king-savanna.html

His post is a look at the Pearl King Savanna, one of last remaining oak savannas in Ohio.  In all honesty though, some of its grass cover is extensive enough to consider it as something of a prairie; a few of his excellent photographs reveal that the horizon is quite distant.  Perhaps this is because of the surrounding farmland.  Though this adjacent agricultural space is very much a landscape of our creation, it is important to remember that it is there because the settlers who poured into the region found such open and "barren" land an attractive place to start plowing and planting.  What could be more pleasant to an immigrant farmer than land that nature has already cleared, and left rich soils to enjoy as well?  The Ohio Valley and Great Lakes were settled relatively fast not only because they had the one thing those living east of the Appalachians craved the most, space, but also because the open landscape only added to the concept.

This had me wondering just how much of the Nearwest and even parts of the interior eastern seaboard used to have savannas and prairies.  Wildfire regimes, both historical and conjectured modern, seem to indicate that they could have been very widespread.  These days, we still have many pine barrens from Long Island southward into southern Florida which have probably survived or renewed themselves because of undesirable soils and/or changing employment patterns.  If the climate and natural processes could support "barrens" in coastal regions, surely they could do they same where they were not entirely different back in the interior valleys of the Appalachians and the lakeplains of Lake Ontario and Erie.  Buffalo, for instance, once thrived in the valleys of Virginia and, you guessed it, the area around Buffalo, NY.  The early colonists and settlers, both French and English, reported the majestic herds in such areas.  They were less thorough in reporting about the landscapes they were found in, except where they found towering forests.

Perhaps this was because nature provided inspiration when the migrants found roadblocks such as mountains and great rivers and lakes.  The scale of the continent's unspoiled lands inspired whole schools of painting that highlighted such expanses, particularly in the work of the Hudson River School.  Such lands also provided inspiration for the birth of the natural romantics like Thoreau and Emerson, and the conservation movement which they spawned.  In contrast, however, little fuss was made about lands that were either convenient, like prairies and savannas, or roadblocks that did not serve to inspire (at least in that era) such as swamps, dry plains, and deserts.  The most striking historical portraits we have of such desires would be in  our conserved lands.  With the exception of swamps set aside for bird refuges, most of the early saved lands were mountains and dramatic valleys.  The Everglades, again in contrast, were viewed as undesirable (despite being one of the most amazing bird habitats in the entire world), and were even being targeted for drainage and destruction by the same people that were promoting conservation elsewhere!

There we have it.  A mountain or large lake could not be moved out of the way, and served as a reminder of the forces that were greater than humanity that could not be tamed.  A grassland?  Well, that would be something more akin to a field that nature had left wild and was just begging to have cultivated for more "useful purposes".  A swamp?  Yuck!  Why would the settlers make a mention out of something they could instead just transform into a monument of expanding civilization, a monument which would leave a much better record and legacy of who they were and why they came there?  Nature was just starting to become appreciated for its own sake back in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and well over a century would go by wherein civilization was still hailed as the primary triumph of man's dominion over creation.

What did we have?  What have we done with it?  Thankfully, we have people like Jim to show us a glimpse of an answer to these questions.  That in mind, let's keep exploring!

On the Concept of Native Gardening, Part One.

One of the great ways to experience some of what one's own backyard has to offer is to brighten up said backyard with some local flora.  This is known in landscaping and gardening circles as working with natives, that is to say flowers, herbaceous plants, shrubs, trees, cacti, and even grasses which are indigenous to the local area.  Ever since I made American Voyages, I wanted to post about the joys and benefits of native gardening, but as I survey my own domain, I find that I happen to like not-so-local things in the yard as much as the next person.  Instead of trying to create an oak-savanna or a beech-maple forest (both are found in remnants within the same few square miles around here), the latter of which might be frowned upon in our suburban fantasy world of golf-course trim lawns, I have some roses, azaleas, morning-glories, and heck, even a Bald Cypress growing.  Last night I even found a hardy cultivar of the lovely evergreen Southern Magnolia (Magnolia Grandiflora) for sale, adapted for outdoor planting in lower Michigan.  At this point, staring at the native elements in the lawn, a slight grimace came over my face as they reminded me how they were surrounded by exotics, and I realized my eco-hypocrisy.  

My horticultural sins put to light then, what types of things can we plant, what do they qualify as, and what are their benefits and/or drawbacks?

Native Plants.

Native plants, as noted, are things that are indigenous to the local ecosystem.  The term indigenous can be difficult to define, especially when we consider time parameters as one criterion.  Something that seems to belong to a place these days might have only found their way there within a few thousand years or so, true.  The global climate does change without human assistance over gradual periods of time, barring a natural disaster of planetary scale (such as a big old space rock hitting us).  Technically speaking, under a vast scale, things like moose and humans are not indigenous to North America because they migrated here over the Bering Land Bridge during the last ice age.  That said, we can pretty much claim that both Bullwinkle and our native peoples are, well, native, as both person and moose naturally found their way here, the moose no doubt being chased by a band of hunters across the dry Bering, neither knowing what they were getting into.  Examples of native plants would be Live Oaks (Quercus Virginiana) in Florida or Black Spruce (Picea Mariana) in Ontario.  Having a native plant in your landscape and garden is almost always a good thing, though this depends on the condition in which the plant is expected to grow.  While a fern might be native to one's area, planting it in full sun requires it to get watered really frequently, which is an inefficient use of water.  This said, here we have two sub-categories of native plants:

Native Plants in and out of Habitat.  

The fern example stands out well, but flowers work even better.  In the yard I have a single Purple Coneflower (Echinacea Purpurea, which has to be one of the most poetic scientific names out there), which is indeed native to Michigan and can be found in savannas and prairies in the state.  Right beside it I have a Wild Columbine (Aquilegia Canadensis), which is native to Michigan and grows on the margins of forests and along similar clearings like river banks (and is also the flower on the blog header).  In the foreground is a sprouting Rough Blazing-Star (Liatris Aspera), native to Michigan, and another prairie and savanna species.  They are all planted beneath a charming Northern Pin Oak (trunk pictured, Quercus Ellipsoidalis), which just so happens to have an isolated native population here in Livingston and neighboring counties.  

Yes, I plant flowers directly into the lawn.

Now the coneflower is not extremely out of place here (though it does not have a record of being native to this exact county, but does right next door, which I dispute, which means I need to hunt some down).  The field across from the subdivision actually is reverting to type into a savanna, and remnants can be found across the main roads adjacent to this field.  The columbine is sort of out place, but as the savanna is surrounded by forests, not terribly so either.  The blazing star is about at home as the coneflower, perhaps more so because they definitely occur in the area, and less so because they like a little bit moister of a setting than the local prairie/savanna.  The oak, though planted by developers solely as a pretty landscape thing, is right at home.  All of these being together naturally, however, is improbable.  Sure, the yard could have once been one of the edges of the savanna grading into the forest and a columbine could be next to a coneflower as such, but... well in any event I suppose this is being overly technical.  The point is, some of these are slightly out of habitat, and some might be in habitat, minus being grown in a lawn of non-native grass.  

How is this good?   Well, I have planted things that belong here, more or less.  Insects get a chance to pollinate something that would otherwise not exist in a developed area, and a semblance of the native ecosystem is restored, albeit by introduction, native but introduced.  The butterflies in the yard are plentiful and the whole scene is thus rather idyllic.  How is this bad?  Well, it happens to be a bit fake, but nature will not complain even if a botanical purist might.  On that note, it would be a bit improper if this were not a lawn  but a prairie remnant trying to be rejuvenated.  In any case, this is the best I can do at making a nice little reminder of what was here without getting a citation for growing a prairie instead of a lawn, which in my opinion is sad, but people like their lawns.  

Anyway, in the same vein, another good example of an introduced native, the Eastern Redbud (Cercis Canadensis).  I apologize for the poor lighting quality of the image, but I only recently learned about the magic of light control on cameras.  

Taken at St. John's golf course in Plymouth, MI.

Redbuds are indeed native to southern Michigan and are often a very striking part of our moister forests.  They are so lovely that they tend to get planted a whole heck of a lot.  They serve as an excellent example of "good plants" we see in our landscapes that would not have been here without human intervention, at least not in quantity, but are not entirely foreign elements of the local area, just the particular ecosystem in which they have been introduced.  This means they might not have popped up here by themselves, but they also blend rather well with the local environment.  Many plants reproduce by seed, and often the seed is carried to new places by animals, animals which sometimes also create new ideal conditions for the plant to flourish (browsing, den and nest creation, etc.).  You know what?  A guy finding a nice iris in a nearby marsh then planting it in his garden is sort of doing the same thing, albeit for aesthetics rather than as a matter of survival.  

So why all the fuss about what belongs and what does not?  Find out in two days and four days for parts two and three of this rant, as well as tomorrow when I do a little Q and A.

Q and A Session Four

This Q and A session is dedicated to the concept of not taking your backyard for granted.  I was lucky to get three questions that worked well this way.

Q: Why so many posts about prairies and savannas?

A: Grasslands are the most common ecosystem across the entire continent.  They can be found in nearly every state, province, and territory of our three nations, albeit in different forms.  In pre-colonial times, they were far more extensive than in the present day, engaging neighboring ecosystems in a battle royale of wildfires, rains, and herd grazing patterns.  Grasslands are extremely resilient and adaptable ecosystems that define the wild nature of our continent on the whole: a fairly warm, windy place that is full of water and yet also remarkably dry.  They can handle the worst weather we get, including extremes in temperature and precipitation, and manage to survive.  Conversely, they are among the most productive and diverse lands on the entire planet, positively exploding with life and beauty with just a little bit of rain and warmth.  They can be found at the edge of deserts, in meadows high atop mountains, far north in the tundra or far south in the leeward slopes of tropical Mexico, in sandy expanses left behind from the last glaciers melting away over the Canadian Shield, amidst the pines and palmettos of Florida, in patches of "barrens" surrounding the great cities of New York and Philadelphia, in clearings amongst great forests, and of course, in the great central plains that stretch from Alberta to Coahuila.

What's more, in addition to being emblematic of the frontier and survivalist spirit of this continent, they defy simplification, and are often the most misunderstood ecosystems out there.  North American grasslands are often thought of like so:

When in fact they are often wonderful worlds bursting with life like:

In short, they are often far more than meets the eye.  On the whole, nature has so many wonderful surprises awaiting for those willing to take the time and explore it.  Our hectic world these days is so caught up in activity for the sake of self-benefit that we often overlook the concept of self-improvement, and definitely leave wonder and exploration out of the equation.  Quite literally, we cannot see the forest for the trees!  Grasslands are wonderful places where we are forced to pay attention to what is underfoot and seemingly invisible to the glancing eye in order to fully appreciate what they have to show us.  This was certainly true for my development in observing and understand ecosystems.  After I gave the Great Plains a chance, I never looked at a forest the same way again.

Speaking of that, to respond to the question on a more personal level, I had always wondered where the forest stopped and the prairie began.  When I was a kid hungry for travel with that dog-eared and bent atlas in my hands, I always envisioned everything from Regina to Dallas to be one giant flat expanse of lawn.  I could not help but imagine what the line between this lawn and the forest to the east looked like, and I pictured a dark, lush forest somewhere in Missouri that all of a sudden petered out into the endless prairie, a wall of tree meeting a sea of grass.  The search for this grand line of division, though largely dispelled when I started to read about the places in that atlas, has always been a bit in the back of my mind even recently.  Whenever I head out west, when driving through Iowa and Missouri, I always take in the scenery with even more intensity and detailed interest than I do elsewhere ecological transitions, or ecotones, occur, expecting to find that line one day.  I wanted to know where the forest turned into the plains which gave way to the mountains which became the desert which... you get the point.  Ecotones are fascinating worlds of connections between diverse areas, both because of the contrast between life zones they display, and because of the shared features between regions they represent.  This dovetails into the next question:

Q: What are some places you have not yet been to in North America that you would put on your "bucket list"?

A: That would make for a very interesting post, and I say that because there are so many places I would want to see before I give myself back to the soil.  I suppose here I can cheat and qualify that question with a specific direction: what places would I put on my list of places I am most ecologically curious about?  I would say that have to do with transitions, and finding more of my great wall of forests.  Specifically, I would give my right eye to see (or rather have seen) where the boreal forest transitions into the central grasslands.  Picture an arc stretching from Edmonton to Winnipeg and down towards Minneapolis.  The biologist-powers that be call this "Aspen Parkland", where the great forests of spruce, fir, poplars, birches, and pines dance and meet with the prairies.  I have always wondered what an outcropping of Canadian Shield granite looks like emerging from tallgrass.  Yep, I have very simple desires and plans in life, a man who wants to find a rock sticking out of a field.  I imagine very little of this landscape survives intact in the United States, and the best bet would be to find it in Canada in some of the national parks set aside to preserve such a landscape, but the remaining ecotones in Minnesota hold a particular fascination for me because they share many species in common with the lands next door in Michigan and Ontario that I love so much.  Algonquin meets the prairie, I can only imagine it!

I would also love to see the Black Hills, as they are the easternmost extension of the great western mountain forests, one of the few places where elements of eastern, western, and northern forests come together, stuck in the middle of hundreds of miles of the Great Plains.  Again, I like putting the puzzle together as much as seeing the finished map.

On the same general note:

Q: You seem to be passionate about much of the country (I assume this is referring to the United States specifically), finding something nice about everywhere.  Is there any place you could not live?  I mean, could you actually live in a desert or on the plains?

A: Probably somewhere in the Deep South, and not out of a cultural bias that leaves me with a raised eyebrow and open mouth whenever I encounter "rednecks" (but when it comes down to it, I find all sorts of people to be far more interesting than undesirable).  The Deep South is exotically lovely, what with magnolias, live oaks (Quercus Virginiana) and balcypresses (Taxodium Distichum) dripping in Spanish Moss, and palmettos making the most of the steamy landscape.  All the same, it is, well, a steamy landscape.  I don't do heat and humidity in combination very well.  I would imagine parts of Mississippi would be my least desirable place to live, owing to the conditions and the fact that anything resembling a mountain would be at least a half day drive away.  Then again, the flora is lovely, the music is great, and the river and Gulf are never far away.  As for the desert and plains, as per my response to the first question, they are not as desolate and devoid of life as they seem to be.  They also both tend to be close to mountains, so if I wanted to, I could easily get my fill of some pine forest for a bit.  I like both snow and palm trees, so the desert or the southern plains could work nicely, sure.  St. George, Utah comes to mind, as they have both.

Well, actually, this is Washington, Utah, but that is right next door.

It also helps to have friends there.  The western migration trend never really has stopped, it seems.  Anyway, I would probably be most at home in northern Ontario or western Quebec, which would be outside of the United States, but you get the picture.  That would be the heart part of my "home is where the heart is" even if I could adapt to any place fairly well.  Even if circumstances forced me to live in Jackson, Mississippi, I would hardly consider my life shot to hell, but would get a really powerful air conditioner as soon as possible, or at least a nice ceiling fan.  I would explore every nook and cranny of my new home and get to know its flowers, trees, history, and way of naming soft drinks rather well.  The Creator left us a nice world to live in, and the least I can do is come to know and appreciate it.

Sunday Afternoon Post: Restoring the Prairie

Very little virgin prairie of any form exists in North America anymore, and even recovering stretches are mostly found in remnants belonging to government lands.  This is a shame, because restoring prairie is a wonderful way to help bring depleted soil back from the brink, and it tends to look far better than whatever sort of a mess tends to get poorly managed in fallow fields.  Among the initiatives taken to restore our grassy heritage are measures in place to let highway medians return to tallgrass and wildflowers.

This is one such strip in Illinois, about thirty miles north of Springfield on I-55.  Much of I-55 in Illinois has medians and margins that consist of restored tallgrass prairie, and in some cases neighboring property owners have permitted the restoration to spread into their land.  In other places, such as this one, the tallgrass intermingles with the oak-hickory forests just as it would have in pre-development times, engaged in a never ending struggle for dominance between grass and tree.   

Defining the Not-Midwest: Geography

Look at the United States.

As you can see, the Midwest is aptly named because it is halfway out there to the western part of the continent.  It sits roughly in the middle of things, even sitting in a time zone (the eastern limit of which is marked by the pale blue line) that is aptly called the central time zone.  The rivers (purple) which flow through it nearly all drain to the Gulf of Mexico, in one spectacular point of land known as the Mississippi delta.  The landscape looks slightly less green than stretches further east do, and in the western edge of the region, things brown out quite a bit as the trees get far and few between.

Now, look at our friends Michigan, northern Ohio, northwest Pennsylvania, western New York, and yes, even southern Ontario.  These areas fall into the eastern timezone, albeit at the middle and western end.  The rivers (pale blue spray on the Lakes and St. Lawrence river) of these areas drain to the Atlantic Ocean through the wonderful inland seas that are the Great Lakes. Things look much greener (though parts of Michigan, Ohio, and Ontario do look a bit more farmed over, to be honest).  And for crying out loud, Detroit is at the same longitude as western South Carolina.  Even the western parts of the state are still due north of the Florida panhandle.  To envision Cleveland being much more western than Erie is simply mind-boggling in the regards of sheer proximity.  Old divisions between north and south at least acknowledged the existence of "border states" both culturally and physically.  Hence, again, the term "Nearwest" is best applied to these areas.

Justification for such a term here is certainly given both in terms of actual location and cultural/commercial links between east and Midwest.  Those rivers do more than just drain water; they have been determining the market for cities such as Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, and even distant Gary and Milwaukee for over two centuries now (Chicago is a different animal, more of a bridge between, well, everything).  They have sent their goods either to Canada or down the St. Lawrence seaway (and formerly the Erie Canal) to foreign markets.  In contrast, goods from the Midwest have made their way to the port of New Orleans and destinations beyond.  The barges of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers also carry different cargo from their Lake freighter counterparts; grains and produce float down towards the Gulf, while everything from autos to iron ore load up the Lakers destined for the Atlantic.  If the map is not evidence enough of the distinct region that the Nearwest forms, the markets that exist because of the conditions of the map are there to support the theory that we have a separate region on our hands.  Anyway, enough of the bare bones of physical geography, let's take a look at environmental geography.

Much of the Midwest is characterized by its dominance of farmland, grid-patterned cities and orderly plots of land, and in general its heavy development.  Much of Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Iowa, and parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and of course the neighboring plains states used to be quite open.  While a settler standing in the middle of Indiana or Illinois would probably still be able to see trees around, there was a lot more sky and grass than had been encountered down in Kentucky and points eastward.  Things would also seem very flat.  This is not to say hills do not exist in these states, but for the most part, the terrain is a rather level affair.  Much of the original landscape is now gone, replaced by nearly endless agricultural development that took advantage of the rich, deep soils of these areas.  Still, the notable absence of extensive forests is because the farms were simply developing land that was rather open to begin with.

A section of restored tallgrass prairie along I-55, and a scene typical of central Illinois.  There are trees here, but there is also natural open space.

Now, this is not to say that Michigan, northern Ohio, and southern Ontario have no farms.  Indeed, there is a lot of corn grown here.  Here and there, though, instead of patches of woodland, are remnants of some truly amazing forests.  While there are definitely tall trees in Illinois and Indiana, the difference between these regions lies in the elements of the forests.  For one, unless they have been planted, pines and spruce are going to be far and few between in the former tallgrass regions.  There are exceptions to this rule, even as there are patches of prairie in Michigan and Ontario, but by and large a notable contrast will be seen by even the most casual of observers.  Illinois and Indiana have lots of oaks, hickories, elms, and shrubs.  Michigan, Ohio, and points east have maples, beeches, pines, and towering trees of all sorts.

Joy road, near the western limits of Canton, Michigan, a rare instance of a natural landscape in Wayne county.  Here we have a typical maple-beech forest.

As you can see, the dominant landscapes of the two different regions are substantially different.  Again, there are exceptions to the rule in these places, but by and large, the Nearwest has a different flavor from the true Midwest, and this is without bringing the Great Lakes themselves into the debate.  Still need convincing?  Well, come by for the last post in this series of defining the Not-Midwest as we explore the wonderful world of politics, where we find the concept of "Midwest" was probably born.