A Myth and Miracle Coming True

This is a post about high-quality plant species – 
and why they make a difference – 
and how people are learning to restore high-quality prairies and savannas.

When discovered in the 1970s, Chevy Chase Prairie was the best that survived in Illinois.
Its intentional destruction was one of the great ecological crimes of the modern age.
Will we ever see its like again? Perhaps yes. Read on.

Aldo Leopold did not sound hopeful as he wrote an elegy for a last Silphium (compass-plant) in his Wisconsin county: 

 “What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked ... Few grieved when the last buffalo left Wisconsin, and few will grieve when the last Silphium follows him to the lush prairies of the never-never land.” 

Yet, the visionary Leopold conspired with other University of Wisconsin academics to try to “restore” a prairie in their Madison arboretum. They had little idea of how good it could be, or how to go about it (no one ever having “restored” any natural ecosystem before). Their early efforts were dismal failures. But in time they progressed, and their example spread from Madison to Chicago. 

In the 1960s, another visionary, Robert Betz started searching for and trying to figure out Illinois’ last real prairies. He gradually learned which species indicated quality.  At first, he found them mostly on the rights-of-way of railroads (see Endnote 1). Then he discovered prairie in pioneer cemeteries, similarly fenced, occasionally mowed, but mostly left alone. Betz sensed a potential reawakening. When he got approvals from cemetery boards and burned, the rare plants exploded back. 

I wonder if Betz ever heard of the prairie in the Chicago suburb of Riverside – in a forest preserve near Brookfield Zoo. Early ecologist Victor Shelford had tried to promote it. In 1926 he had edited the “Naturalist's Guide to the Americas” and for Illinois listed two surviving prairies, one in Riverside at 31^stStreet and 1^stAve. He wrote, 

“Since very few original tracts of prairie now remain, it is of the most urgent importance that some be set aside in perpetuity before it is forever too late.” 

Indeed, his book also tried to spur conservation by listing Chicago area eco-groups such as they were in 1926 including …

Chicago Academy of Sciences

Friends of Our Native Landscape

Illinois Audubon Society

Prairie Club

Riverside Wildflower Preservation Society

… and many more, nineteen in all. But the next reference I find to the Riverside Prairie wasn't until 33 years later, in an American Midland Naturalist journal article from 1959 by the same V. E. Shelford along with G. S. Winterringer. The article is titled “Disappearance of an Area of Prairie in the Cook County, Illinois, Forest Preserve District.” 

Riverside Prairie was filling with trees – the prairie vegetation was reduced from ten acres in 1927 to three acres in 1959. The authors thank Roberts Mann of the Forest Preserves for help with the article. Mann assured them that there had been no fire there since 1930. (Forest preserve handouts of that era emphasized the importance of protecting all preserve land from fire.) A few paragraphs later the article states, perhaps optimistically: “There is a consensus of opinion among those who are planning on protecting prairie that burning should take place about every three years.”  

I found no references to what happened following Shelford’s second article. But his diagram (above) shows the exact street corner, so I went there. The photo below shows what I found. 

It was a nightmare. This prairie was: 

a) protected by a conservation agency, 

b) famous (or at least well known to science), 

c) well documented, and 

d) dead. 

Under the buckthorn and other trees, I could find no hint of prairie vegetation beyond a few nodding onions along the road edge. 

Shelford had done a lot of the organizing that led to the formation of The Nature Conservancy – out of frustration that other organizations weren’t conserving much. But later he also didn’t hesitate to criticize when the Conservancy seemed to be losing its focus. “The Nature Conservancy is turning into another God-damned Audubon Society,” he told Richard Brewer in 1958. According to Brewer, the 80-year old Shelford saw Audubon as mired in “empire building and image polishing.” 

Shelford and George Fell lost influence in The Nature Conservancy. Then they started over, on the local level, establishing the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission as a down-to-earth nature preservation organization. To buttress the vision, Fell hired the staff that in the 1970s, conducted the first-of-its-kind Illinois Natural Areas Inventory. The Inventory’s job was to define nature and locate it precisely on the ground – for setting conservation priorities. 

Betz had been making lists of prairie indicator species. Some of these species (now called “conservatives”) were the ones, like scarlet painted cup, that vanished first, when a natural prairie began to degrade from brush or overgrazing. These same species he found to be the most difficult to restore in prairie restorations. Betz (see Endnote 2) listed the pinnacle of these royal species as: 

Scientific Name	Common Name
Asclepias meadii	Meads milkweed
Cypripedium candidum	White lady-slipper
Gentiana puberulenta	Prairie gentian
Habenaria leucophaea	Prairie white-fringed orchid
Hypoxis hirsuta	Yellow star grass
Lilium philadelphicum	Prairie lily
Oxalis violacea	Violet wood sorrel
Scutellaria parvula	Small skullcap
Viola pedatifida	Prairie violet

He taught us to assess the quality and conservation value of prairie remnants in part as a function of how many such plant were present and common. He saw restoring such species as the ultimate and most challenging goal of prairie restoration. 

In this seed production bed, the short, seed-covered plant in the foreground is one of Betz’ ultimates - small skullcap. Other conservatives visible here include prairie milkweed, bastard toadflax, bearded wheatgrass, and savanna blazing star.  

Fell’s Illinois Natural Areas Inventory discovered the Chevy Chase Prairie, briefly famous as the best surviving in Illinois, until then unnoticed behind a trailer park near Buffalo Grove. With its hundreds of rare species and likely thousands of rare (mostly small) animals, it should have been at the top of the conservation list. But before conservationists could act, it was purposefully bulldozed by the owner so it wouldn’t stand in the way of his development plans. 

Dr. Robert Betz (white shirt) burns Markham Prairie with media in tow. When Betz went looking for remnants, “the Illinois prairie” was a myth and a vision. He coaxed the un-dead back toward thriving life through collaboration, detective work, fire, weeding, public relations, and passion. 

Betz said that all our prairies – even the most pristine we could find – had been badly diminished. They’d all suffered various harms. They’d all lost species. It was often thrilling for us to discover a high-quality little prairie, protect it legally, start to burn it, and then see at least some of the rare species re-assert themselves. 

Our understanding of quality or “conservativeness” was gradually expanded and refined – first by the Illinois Natural Areas Inventory – and in a different way by Gerould Wilhelm. Those lists of quality species are now basic to prairie evaluation. For example, the list below shows the nine mesic black-soil prairie species that rate highest on Wilhelm's conservatism scale. On a range of zero to ten, they are “perfect tens.”   

 

Common Name	CC	Scientific name Wilhelm and Rericha	Scientific name Swink and Wilhelm
cream wild indigo	10	Baptisia leucophaea	Baptisia leucophaea
scarlet painted-cup	10	Castilleja coccinea	Castilleja coccinea
white prairie clover	10	Dalea candida	Petalostemum candidum
prairie gentian	10	Gentiana puberulenta	Gentiana puberulenta
prairie white-fringed orchid	10	Platanthera leucophaea	Habenaria leucophaea
prairie lily	10	Lilium philadelphicum	Lilium philadelphicum
prairie panic grass	10	Dichanthelium leibergii	Panicum leibergii
prairie dropseed	10	Sporobolus heterolepis	Sporobolus heterolepis
heart-leaved Alexanders	10	Zizia aptera	Zizia aptera

 

If a mesic black-soil prairie remnant has large numbers of “10s” (and “9s” and “8s”) – then it’s high quality. If it does not, it probably would not be judged high quality by most experts. 

All of these species were rare and vanishing until the prairie conservation movement began to pick up steam. Most conservative species are now thriving in at least a few large restoration sites. Two restored grasslands have hundreds of blooming plants of the (Federal-endangered) prairie white-fringed orchid. One of these sites is thousands of acres; the other is 150 acres. 

We can give much more intensive care to smaller sites. From 1-acre sites, we learn to restore 10-acre sites. As we ramp up by orders of magnitude, we have to find replacements for our more intensive-care approaches. When 100-acre sites teach us to restore 1,000-acre sites, we lose some capabilities, but we can add the bison, which are thought to promote many rare forbs (wildflowers) by preferentially eating grass. We learned much from Somme that helped in the early stages of restoring Nachusa. Wise managers would learn much from Nachusa and other ambitious efforts to restore the tens of thousands of acres at Midewin. 

Some “10s”, “9s” and “8s” are dropping out (or barely holding on) in some small remnants. Can they make it in larger remnants and prairie restorations? Conservative species are already tentative successes at a few sites. (For examples, see Endnote 3.) 

So here’s an early report on scarlet painted cup – the star of the photo that opened this post. Decades ago we got a few seeds from Chevy Chase Prairie before the bulldozing. We saw one plant emerge at Somme, bloom gloriously, then vanish a couple of days later, probably eaten by deer, which at that time were censused at a devastating rate of 160 per square mile at Somme. We kept our eyes open for more painted cups, but despite deer control, we found none, for decades. Scarlet painted cup was also nearly gone from Wolf Road Prairie, the other iconic “big” Illinois site with 25 acres of very high quality. (See Endnote 4.) Then a few years ago, we learned that a fine prairie owned by a local land trust had just what we were looking for – a thriving mesic black-soil population of those conservative scarlet painted cups. We had helped those folks out on a few projects, and they admired the work at Somme, so they donated seed.

We had feared that the northeastern Illinois ecotype was largely gone.
Then we learned of a substantial population in a fine nearby prairie.

Two years ago Somme had 45 blooming scarlet painted cups. Last year we had one (the plant is apparently a biennial in some situations and an annual in others). This year seven patches appeared (1 to 26 plants each) for a total of 73 plants. Next year: what? Do these numbers represent the beginnings of new health and richness – or temporary not-to-be-sustained ephemera? Only time will tell. But many of the high conservatives have made great progress thanks to temporary (we hope) intensive care. (For an annotated list see Endnote 5.)  

Cages to exclude both deer and voles seem needed for Somme's current small numbers of scarlet painted cups. We hope that in time they’ll increasingly thrive and graduate out of such “intensive care” – as many other conservative species have done. 

The prairie was almost a myth, but these days it is increasingly real. "Myth" doesn’t necessarily mean that something wasn’t true. It may have been true or not. Some myths are fakery. But the classic myth is a story about the past that has deep truth in it. Science barely knew the prairie as an ecological community because it was “gone” before ecology was “born.” Now, in many ways, conservationists and ecologists enjoy meeting it for the first time.

Endnotes

Endnote 1: Railroad Prairies

True prairie survived best where railroads had been laid across original unplowed prairie and then fenced – to protect settlers’ livestock – which meant that cows, horses, pigs etc. didn’t graze those areas to death. The railroad companies also were said to burn their rights of way, to keep the brush down. Betz found the rare Mead's milkweed only on the highest quality railroad strips. Some "railroad prairies" today are nature preserves. But a true prairie also needs animals to function well (see Endnote 6), and these strip fragments are not big enough to preserve most animal species. 

Endnote 2: Indicator Species

Betz would teach us the indicator species as we prowled the wilds looking for remnants. In his postumously published book "The Prairie of the Illinois Country" (2011) he listed the quality species under "Prairie Succession" - writing that the "climax" or highest quality species would be restorable, he hoped, as the restorations aged. In his careful way, he wrote that "it is doubtful whether any restoration has reached the climax stage" - but he gave "proposed" and "tentative" species lists to help define the concept. These "third stage" and "fourth stage" lists are shown below.

Prairie Plants of the Third Stage (proposed)

Scientific Name	Common Name
Amorpha canescens	lead plant
Asclepias hirtella	tall green milkweed
Asclepias viridiflora	short green milkweed
Aster azureus	sky-blue aster
Aster laevis	smooth blue aster
Baptisia leucophaea	cream wild indigo
Bromus kalmii	prairie brome
Chelone glabra	turtlehead
Heuchera richardsonii	prairie alum root
Lithospermum canescens	hoary puccoon
Lysimachia quadrifolia	whorled loosestrife
Panicum leibergii	prairie panic grass
Polygala senega	Seneca snakeroot
Spiranthes magnicamporum	great plains ladies tresses
Sporobolus heterolepis	prairie dropseed
Valeriana ciliata	common valerian

Prairie Plants of the Fourth Stage (tentative)

Scientific Name	Common Name
Asclepias meadii	Meads milkweed
Cypripedium candidum	White lady-slipper
Gentiana puberulenta	Prairie gentian
Habenaria leucophaea	Prairie white-fringed orchid
Hypoxis hirsuta	Yellow star grass
Lilium philadelphicum	Prairie lily
Oxalis violacea	Violet wood sorrel
Scutellaria parvula	Small skullcap
Viola pedatifida	Prairie violet

These lists have something of a "draft" feel to them. Most of the species are mesic black-soil species, but some are species more typical of wet, or dry, or sand prairies. Gerould Wilhelm would improve this approach dramatically as shown in Endnote 3.

Endnote 3: Coefficients of Conservatism

Indicators of high-quality prairie from Swink and Wilhelm

The list of the nine species that have “Coefficients of Conservatism” of 10 was nice, short, and easy to read. But for prairie remnant evaluation (and restoration trend evaluation), the following longer list may be more helpful. These 26 characteristic mesic black-soil prairie species have conservatism coefficients 8, 9, or 10. 

Scientific Name	C	Common Name
Amorpha canescens	9	Lead plant
Asclepias sullivantii	8	Prairie milkweed
Aster azureus	8	Sky-blue aster
Aster laevis	9	Smooth blue aster
Baptisia leucophaea	10	Cream wild indigo
Bromus kalmii	10	Prairie brome
Carex bicknellii	10	Prairie oval sedge
Carex meadii	9	Mead’s stiff sedge
Castilleja coccinea	10	Indian paintbrush
Eryngium yuccifolium	9	Rattlesnake master
Gentiana puberulenta	10	Prairie gentian
Platanthera leucophaea	10	Prairie white-fringed orchid
Heuchera richardsonii	8	Prairie alum root
Hypoxis hirsuta	9	Yellow star grass
Lilium philadelphicum	10	Prairie lily
Lithospermum canescens	8	Hoary puccoon
Oxalis violacea	9	Violet wood sorrel
Panicum leibergii	10	Prairie panic grass
Pedicularis canadensis	9	Prairie betony
Petalostemum candidum	9	White prairie clover
Petalostemum purpureum	9	Purple prairie clover
Potentilla arguta	9	Prairie cinquefoil
Phlox glaberrima	8	Smooth phlox
Sporobolus heterolepis	10	Prairie dropseed
Viola pedatifida	9	Prairie violet
Zizia aptera	10	Heart-leaved Alexanders

Endnote 4: Wolf Road Prairie

Greg Jerzyk reports that at Wolf Road, scarlet painted cup “has been present every year that I have looked for it for many years.” This year he found two stems and photographed them on June 11^th (see below). 

Then on July 7, 2018, Greg found the plants again to report on associated species. (Conservative species typically do best with other conservative species.) 

“What I found today amidst high growth was a barely visible pair of stems of Castelleja. They were fading and about 5 inches apart.” I had asked for associated species that within a quarter meter of the painted cups. He reports, “I found with the help of Rita McCabe: sawtooth sunflower (Helianthus grosseserratus), yarrow (Achillea millefolium), Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum), smooth phlox (Phlox glaberrima), prairie violet (Viola pedatifida), bastard toadflax (Commandra umbellata), wild quinine (Parthenium integrifolium), mountain mint (Pycnanthemum virginianum), dogwood (Cornus racemosa), prairie dock (Silphium terebinthinaceum), starry false Solomon’s seal (Smilacina stellata), rosinweed (Silphium integrifolium), and what I believe was cord grass (Spartina pectinata) as it was NOT in flower.”   

Endnote 5: After 38 Years 

Typical "fair or good quality" prairie restorations don’t have large numbers of most of the 26 species listed earlier and below. Indeed, most “remnant” prairies are also too small or too degraded to have many. One way to evaluate a prairie is to just walk and look. If many of the species below are in most every square yard or meter, that's impressive. A more nuanced, quantitative, and replicable method is to "sample" random quadrants. You may use the Floristic Quality Assessment (which weighs the species below most heavily - along with diversity) to compare sites or determine trends over time.

The table below shows the status of the 26 highest-quality mesic prairie species after 38 years of restoration at Somme Prairie Grove (SPG) – a black-soil savanna and prairie complex with about 20 acres of habitat for mesic prairie species. 

Scientific Name	C	Common Name	1980 Status at SPG	2018 Status at SPG
Amorpha canescens	9	Lead plant	absent	common
Asclepias sullivantii	8	Prairie milkweed	rare	frequent
Aster azureus	8	Sky-blue aster	absent	common
Aster laevis	9	Smooth blue aster	rare	frequent
Baptisia leucophaea	10	Cream wild indigo	absent	common
Bromus kalmii	10	Prairie brome	rare	common
Carex bicknellii	10	Prairie oval sedge	absent	occasional
Carex meadii	9	Mead’s stiff sedge	rare	occasional
Castilleja coccinea	10	Indian paintbrush	absent	rare
Eryngium yuccifolium	9	Rattlesnake master	rare	common
Gentiana puberulenta	10	Prairie gentian	absent	rare
Platanthera leucophaea	10	Prairie white-fringed orchid	absent	frequent
Heuchera richardsonii	8	Prairie alum root	rare	frequent
Hypoxis hirsuta	9	Yellow star grass	rare	common
Lilium philadelphicum	10	Prairie lily	absent	occasional
Lithospermum canescens	8	Hoary puccoon	rare	frequent
Oxalis violacea	9	Violet wood sorrel	rare	frequent
Panicum leibergii	10	Prairie panic grass	absent	common
Pedicularis canadensis	9	Prairie betony	absent or rare	common
Petalostemum candidum	9	White prairie clover	absent	frequent
Petalostemum purpureum	9	Purple prairie clover	absent	common
Potentilla arguta	9	Prairie cinquefoil	rare or absent	rare
Phlox glaberrima	8	Smooth phlox	rare	common
Sporobolus heterolepis	10	Prairie dropseed	rare	common
Viola pedatifida	9	Prairie violet	rare	common
Zizia aptera	10	Heart-leaved Alexanders	absent	rare

Progress toward quality has been great, and there's still a long way to go.

Each of the above species has a Somme Prairie Grove restoration story worth telling. Earlier posts told conservation stories about some techniques and gave details on some of these species, for example the prairie lady-slipper and white-fringed orchid. We hope to continue such posts. Another earlier post summarized Somme's goals and methods.

Endnote 6: Hummingbirds

They're said to be the principal pollinators of scarlet painted cup. Over millions of years evolved the relationship that influenced this plant to become red, a color that insect pollinators don't see. That saves nectar for the humming birds - and rewards the birds for flying their "pollination missions" over the often long distances between isolated populations. (See also "What Difference Does Fire Pink Make?"

Hummingbirds don't nest in grass, so scarlet painted cup must have been a plant of savannas, open woodlands, and prairies near trees. Maintaining and restoring the relations among plants, animals, fungi, and other parts of the ecosystem are crucial to research and conservation. 

References

Floyd Swink and Gerould Wilhelm, Plants of the Chicago Region, 4th edition, 1994

Gerould Wilhelm and Laura Rericha, Flora of the Chicago Region, 2017 

Acknowledgements

Marlin Bowles took the haunting photo of Chevy Chase Prairie. The area where he snapped that photo is now a huge (and mostly empty) parking lot.

Greg Jerzyk generously provided the Wolf Road reports and photo.

Eriko Kojima and Kathy Garness caught typos and offered helpful editing suggestions.