Junegrass … an adventure … with some important implications

Learning Big Things from a Little Plant
What is “Whole Conservation”?
 
“A too cautious observer would, perhaps have shrunk from such speculations … But sincere and ardent searchers after truth, in exploring the dark regions of the ecosystem, must feel ourselves bound to speak of whatever a ray from the torch of truth may reach, even though the features of that object should be but dimly revealed.” 
Richard Owen, more or less

Short, neat, erect, Junegrass startled us in a way that shouldn’t have been a surprise if we’d paid more attention to an important, little-appreciated teaching of Dr. Robert Betz. But then it startled again and again. 
 
This handsome little, now-rare grass blooms in May and then dries to gold in late June. A perennial, next spring it will continue its Somme adventures that so boldly suggest change in conservation practice. 
 
When first finding it, at Somme, years ago, I’d never seen it. Local and regional books listed Junegrass (Koeleria cristata or macrantha) as a species of dry sands, not the rich soils where I’ve mostly worked. I’d come across Junegrass only in the context of a bizarrely delivered and haunting message from Henry Thoreau (see Endnote 1. Thoreau). 
 
Then in the highest quality little remnant patch of Somme Prairie, after years of burning, up it popped. It should not have been there. And yet, very-high-quality sites regularly produce the unexpected. Many species can survive stress for decades, emerging annually as just a few leaves, keeping the roots alive, waiting for better conditions. The conditions this grass liked are high quality – diverse, competitive, and rich. Burn for many years, and unexpected biodiversity will restore, if it survives.
 
Botanist Marion Cole did not record this distinctive grass in the Somme Prairie list she compiled from 1968 through 1972. It does not appear in the twenty plots there, sampled by the Illinois Natural Areas Inventory experts in the late seventies. But then this remnant was unburned for nearly a century and dense with brush. Junegrass was waiting for stewards.

The illustration above is from The Manual of the Grasses, by heroine of agrostology, Agnes Chase. For more about Chase, well worth knowing, see Endnote 2. Junegrass grows from coast to coast. It’s not the same everywhere. She writes of Koeleria cristata: “Variable. several American varieties have been proposed, but the forms are inconstant and intergrading, and it is not practicable to distinguish definite varieties.” Ah, yes. But the great Chase is referring to taxonomy, not conservation. Among the genes there are indeed differences, and there are compelling reasons that we don’t want to lose the ones adapted to the world’s richest soils. 
 
We’ve never found more than a very few Junegrass heads blooming and setting seed in one small, best little part of Somme Prairie. We’ve never found it in degraded areas. Later we found it in another area, the one little, high-quality, wet-mesic patch – giving me additional disquiet. Instead of in dry sand, the plant was showing up not only in black soil but also in wet.
 
On a busy day (they were all busy), we grabbed a few dried seedheads and briefly checked for ripe seed. We found none. Some grass seeds can be very small, or obscurely packaged in chaff. Following our approved plan, we carried the dried stuff we hoped included seeds east across the river and railroad tracks to Somme Prairie Grove. We threw it around in a couple of the best areas and waited.
 
Honestly, we didn’t exactly wait. Our minds focused elsewhere, and we forgot. But thrillingly, a few brief years later, handsome little Junegrass plants showed up where we broadcast those seeds. 
 
Did we fail to follow the spirit of the rules here? The official “Illinois Plant Translocation/Restoration Policy” says that a “new population … should … be within the range of habitats in which a species is known to occur.” The “disquiet” I felt was partly because the appearance of this plant violated my understanding of the precious Somme remnant; it was black soil; it should not suddenly be producing sand plants. But the disquiet also reflected restoring this “sand plant” to a black soil savanna. The savanna was not part of the Nature Preserve and technically not subject to its rules, but still… Then in 2017, after decades of seeing Junegrass listed as only a species of dry sand in book after book, we were encouraged finally to read in the new Flora of the Chicago Region, Wilhelm and Rericha, 2017, that they found its habitats also to include “wet-mesic to mesic black-soil prairies, either on morainic till or outwash, the habitats on which have been nearly obliterated.” Yes, it grows in both such habitats at Somme Prairie. For better or worse, it is much more common, where restored, in the black-soil savanna of Somme Prairie Grove, whether its place there even today can be historically proven or not. Perhaps we should say, let Junegrass fight for its right to evolve within that savanna’s full, restored biodiversity as we cheer it on. 
 
What if it hadn’t popped up at Somme Prairie, should we have restored it there? Many would say no; don’t meddle; the books say it doesn’t belong. I might agree, on many remnant sites. But the 2017 book seemed to suggest that it ought to be okay for restoration in some mesic and wet-mesic black-soil prairies. Dr. Betz had strongly recommended in public that people not mess with remnants. At the same time, privately, he taught me that there were important exceptions. (See a “private discussion” summarized in Endnote 3.) To state the principle simply, if we don’t find places for them somewhere, many species populations will pass from the Earth. In some preserves, restore all that could have been there. We could call this goal "Whole Ecosystem Conservation" or "Whole Ecosystem Restoration." 
 
“Endangered species” is an easy concept to understand, but it misses the major point of conservation, especially for the tallgrass region. In some other places, micro-habitats create micro-species with limited ranges, and many slightly different species grow there. People would say they’re “hot spots” of species diversity. They are important to conservation. But the emerging field of biodiversity science struggles to get across the point that biodiversity conservation has to be pursued at three levels: the gene pool, the species, and the ecosystem. Not just species. 
 
We in the Midwest strive to be stewards of ecosystems and gene pools made up of species with ranges often extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific and even across oceans. Some populations look utterly different when you get far from here, but they are considered to be all the same species because a chain of interbreeding extends (or extended) all that distance. A species may not be endangered, and yet important parts of its gene pool may be. The fact that Junegrass as a species is not endangered does not mean that the Somme populations is necessarily less important than some friggin frigwort that is slightly different from other frigworts because it’s isolated on only one cliffside. Our local plants may have unique and important genetic alleles that exist nowhere else.  
 
Speaking practically, for a brief moment, we value biodiversity in part because we may need obscure alleles. Grass feeds the world. Consider not only such grasses as wheat, rice, corn, oats, etc. but also the fact that cows, chickens, and even these days many fish mostly eat grass, in the form of pasture and/or crop grains. As plant diseases evolve, crops are only kept viable by agronomists who can regularly find needed alleles from wild grass relatives. We want to keep diverse alleles alive to cure diseases (in humans or in crop plants) and also make various crops more “heart-healthy” or nutritionally superior in other ways. For crops, we may need alleles that work in the prairie soils, which play so disproportionately valuable a role for the planet. We want to leave the richness of biodiversity heritage for future generations. Thus ends this pitch from the world of the practical. 

 
For better or worse, more details on Junegrass (Endnote 4 - Data) and its messages (Endnote 5 - Animals) (Endnote 6 - Invitation) are hidden away among the endnotes. Perhaps some will interest you. 
 

Endnotes

Endnote 0 - Openning Quote
The actual words in the opening quote, if you’re a stickler, are:
 
“A too cautious observer would, perhaps have shrunk from such speculations … But the sincere and ardent searcher after truth, in exploring the dark regions of the past, must feel himself bound to speak of whatever a ray from the intellectual torch may reach, even though the features of that object should be but dimly revealed.”
 
Those words were written by Richard Owen in 1842 who used them to justify his paper claiming that the huge bones being found in England, America, and Asia proved that incredible creatures had once roamed the Earth and proposing the name “dinosaur” for those creatures. (See The Monster’s Bones by David K. Randall, W.W.Norton and Company, 2022.) He was right, and the name stuck.
 
Endnote 1 - Thoreau
Sometime in the eighties, I received a message from Thoreau, personally handed to me after a speech I gave in a church in Concord, Massachusetts. With my work being written up in the New York Times, I was receiving a lot more speaking invitations than I could accept. But I couldn’t turn down a request to promote restoration at Walden Pond to the Thoreau Society at an anniversary meeting, speaking from the pulpit of the church that Thoreau belonged to, resigned from on principle, and then joined again, if I remember right. After my talk, the President of the Society said, “would this interest you?” and handed me a copy of a letter from Thoreau. The man had been sick and declining, apparently from tuberculosis, couldn’t shake it, and travelled to Illinois hoping the change in climate might help. While here, somewhere near Rockford, he conducted what may have been the first scientific sampling of a prairie. I am not a historian of science. But what he recounted in a letter to a female friend back in Massachusetts invoked the prairie in the guise of “the most beautiful bouquet” he’d ever seen. He had assembled it at random, and thus it was nature. Walking across a fine prairie, at each step he plucked the plant that touched the end of his shoe and added it to his beautiful bunch. He listed the species that made up this bouquet in order of frequency. June grass was first on the list. Prairie had been my life. How could I not know such a grass! Thus, when it popped up in one of my favorite places, I took extra notice. 
 
Endnote 2 - Agnes Chase

Agnes Chase was this country's undisputed authority on grasses for decades. Her book was law. She had no degrees in the field. She just worked hard, cooperated well, and ruled.

My favorite story about Chase came from her years at the Field Museum. Staff experts are at times required to attend events and mix with wealthy donors. She did it but was incapable of small talk. When introduced to a new person, her opening line was said to typically be, "What grasses do you study?"

Endnote 3 - confidential
Dr. Robert Betz was a major mentor to me and many. He “spoke in italics” (according to a National Geographic writer) and could in turns be subtle, funny, or thunder like an Old Testament prophet. 
 
Unlike any before him, he did ecological restoration for prairie remnants. Most people would, if they cared at all, say “Not remnants! Don’t meddle! Leave them alone! People degrade what they touch!” Betz too would say that in public, but not in private, as I wrote up in a journal article (Successional Restoration: Thinking Like a Prairie, Restoration & Management Notes, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Summer 1994), pp. 32-39, University of Wisconsin Press).
 
What he said and did made sense, but few people understood it, and there was no culture of prairie conservation in which to embody the needed ethics. To some degree I violated confidences in my article, but I was trying to build culture. Betz said he talked my article over with his wife, and they decided in the end that, “it was fun, and good.” 
 
Betz’s reticence stemmed from his fear that “wildflower enthusiasts” would raid the little rare prairies he was finding and trying to protect – to dig up plants for their own gardens – or “improve” prairies by planting fancy rare plants there, as in a botanic garden. In fact, people did it. Professor Betz had hired nature enthusiast Carl Bartel to manage Markham Prairie once the University owned it. Then he fired him, because Bartel insisted on planting (inappropriate) rare plants along the trail. 
 
The restoration that Betz did in remnants was different. He studied the ecosystem. He promoted respect and affection for remnants. But he insisted that none were “pristine.” They were all damaged and diminished. They had lost species over a century of fragmentation, over-grazing, fire suppression, and invasive species. He did not expect all prairies to be alike, but he believed that many of the differences between sites were actually unnatural degradations. When he “saved” and began to “manage” a cemetery, he wouldn’t hesitate to grab seeds from a nearby railroad prairie and scatter them in the cemetery. No one should do this without authority that comes from expert review. But some protected reserves should be Noah’s Arks for the region.
 
At Markham Prairie, Betz repeatedly showed me species, formerly missing, that subsequently thrived after he broadcast seeds from similar sites nearby. He pointed out distinct patches of smooth phlox or white prairie clover that he said started from his seeds and were growing bigger annually. Their increasing success suggested that they belonged.
 
Somme is a similar site. The Prairie Nature Preserve (west of the railroad tracks) consisted of a few acres of high and very high quality surrounded by sixty acres of degradation. But even the very high quality had no prairie clovers and was without other species that almost certainly would have been present in those seventy acres. The Nature Preserves Commission approved a plan to restore the sixty acres (outside the high-quality area) with species from nearby sites that likely would have been there. 
 
East of the tracks we restore savanna – because that’s what’s remnant there. Scores of formerly missing savanna species are now thriving in Somme Prairie Grove after being rescued by seed from now destroyed and lost gene pools from similar nearby sites. The Somme stewards are Noah. 
 
But please understand, there are a lot of crazy people in this world (or should we say “wacky and unprincipled”?). Thus it’s dangerous to suggest it’s okay to meddle with Nature Preserves. Please help spread the cultural principle that we don’t do it without authoritative approval based on good judgement. Honorable people who respect science would not so meddle. 
 
Some sites should have no seeds added. They should be studied. Some sites should benefit from work to recover their full biodiversity potential. That may mean sometimes restoring some species on the basis of judgement. In our tallgrass region, a great many species populations are being lost annually. Even if a preserve already has a species present, there may be genetic alleles in other nearby populations that may be important in the long run but may cease to exist if neglected populations die out. A species may need some “ark” sites where all the alleles can mix together as genetic fitness continues to evolve in the face of changes in climate and other factors. If we were to wait until science has time to prove a site has unique genetic alleles, we will never act. At least a few sites of all types in each region should be “intensive care” recipients of seeds from threatened populations nearby (preferably with some chaff and even soil, that could harbor unique life beyond plants). The Markham and Somme preserves are currently such sites, as are a few others. “Ark sites” represent an important new component of biodiversity conservation that deserves more study, coherence, and leadership. 
 
Endnote 4 - data 
We initially recorded our experimental records in a series of logbooks. They are voluminous and un-indexed, and it’s not easy to find stuff. Two Junegrass entries I find are:
 
Logbook. July. 2003
This year the first three Junegrass clumps appeared, all on (Somme Prairie Grove’s) South Slope, but widely separated.
 
Logbook. June 10. 2007
Junegrass count: 30 plants at South Slope center (vanishing Indiangrass area through rootling strip and trail branch to left – all close to (within 20’ of) and on east side of trail). 7 plants on the dropseed south edge of South Slope (but none in the higher, drier part). 5 east of the old party spot, near where the old trail forks north. 
 
Some of our records are on misc. scraps of paper, stored in random piles, like the following (located by way of miracle).

The first handwritten entry above achieved more clarity in the logbook (above, previous). But the 2014 record appears to survive only on this note. It helpfully tells us that that we had broadcast seed in our driest habitat (Coyote Knob) sometime previously. One plant was also seen in an area where I doubted we would have seeded. Thus the comment: “odd.” Was this restored species finding ways to get around on its own?
 
There are no logbook records on any subject during June or July of 2014. By then, most records were being kept electronically (now mostly inaccessible, after Google or Apple pulled the support out from under the super-convenient-and-helpful RestorationMap app brilliantly designed by Will Freyman) or on paper maps. The paper maps survive and are great. Two are below:

The word “planted” on the above map means “seeds were broadcast.” The areas chosen include some of the driest on the site, reflecting our understanding then of where it belonged. 
 
Although the “2018” would be easy to miss, the following map is from 2015 and 2018:

The red numbers 5, 69, and 6 in the middle are those original Party Spot and South Slope populations that first appeared in 2003. Only one additional population has emerged, apparently from the seeding of 2006 (the red 2 on the right). Of course, only blooming plants are recorded; it’s not within the realm of practicality to find non-blooming leaves of this grass, mixed with all the other grass leaves, so plants get recorded only on years when they choose to bloom. 
 
In 2018 – as recorded above in the ugly and difficult to see maroon ink – there were two new populations: 8 plants on Coyote Knob and 5 on Middle Slope. Numbers at the previous areas had fallen sharply, but this species, like most conservatives, is very ready to skip putting energy into reproduction during years that don’t seem favorable. A note from 2019 shows those numbers back up again. There seems to have been no monitoring of this species since 2019. 
 
Endnote 5 - How about animals? 

Nachusa Grasslands was born with the ark concept in mind. Soon Dr. Ron Panzer was hard at work developing restoration techniques for rare butterflies and other invertebrates. When Bill Kleiman heard about a site where Franklin's ground squirrels were being "controlled" as pests, he trapped some and restored them to Nachusa. The Lincoln Park Zoo is experimenting with the restoration of many animal species to appropriate habitats. When Healy Road Prairie needed to be rescued and moved to Bluff Spring Fen, Doug Taron swept up as many insects as he could and drove them over while trucks were bringing chunks of prairie sod. 

But rather little of this is being done, especially compared to plants. We don't read much about what works and what doesn't. 

Endnote 6 - Invitation
In the unlikely event that you’re still reading this long post, perhaps you really care about this stuff. If you’d like to help lead experiments like this at Somme Prairie Grove, we welcome serious offers. Or if you might like to work with our incomparable and difficult old records, we’d welcome that too. 
 
So many species would benefit from help. Only the very most superficial attention has been paid to Junegrass in all these decades. A small bit of ecological Judo can produce significant results. What we’re learning is significant. We still see just scattered blooming Junegrass plants, but gradually more and more of them. Perhaps, as with many species in restorations, it will ultimately fade and be gone. But we kind of suspect that instead it’s increasingly worming its way into the best quality areas. Side by side with small skullcap, bastard toadflax, prairie violet, Leiberg’s panic grass, pale spike lobelia and others, it’s part of Somme Prairie Grove’s evolution towards a recovered natural area, in the biodiversity sense. 
 
This blessing happens 
and we understand it 
only because so many good people chip in with muscles and minds. 
 
Might you like to monitor and/or restore Junegrass or some other orphan species every year? Or every few years? If so, let us know. You’d be in good company. 
 
Partial List of Who’s Leading What Special Projects Currently at Somme 
 
Restoration of Prairie White-fringed Orchid: Lisa Musgrave
Restoration of Eared False Foxglove: Eriko Kojima and Sai Ramakrishna
Restoration of Carex formosa: Stephen Packard and Emma Leavens
Restoration of prairie lily, prairie gentian, scarlet painted cup, bearded wheat grass, fringed gentian, and a long list of special and needy plant species: Eriko Kojima and Stephen Packard, but a long list of participants would be way better
Trail maintenance: Estelle Ure, John McMartin, Kathy Wassman, Donna Wittert, Rebeccah Hartz, Eriko Kojima, and Stephen Packard
Intensive Care for “Intermediate” areas: Stephen Packard, Eriko Kojima, and Sai Ramakrishna
Bird Monitoring: Stephen Packard
Herding Cats for the Organizing of “Workdays”: Eriko Kojima, Steph Place, Estelle Ure, and Rebeccah Hartz
Zone Steward: Northwest Prairie: Jeanne Dunning
“Edge Hedge” or “Thicket Fence”: Stephen Packard and Eriko Kojima
Seed gathering and broadcast: Eriko Kojima, Christos Economou, Donna Wittert, Rebeccah Hartz, and others

Plant monitoring for stewardship purposes: Emma Leavens, Paul Swanson, Sai Ramakrishna, and volunteers in the Chicago Botanic Garden's Plants of Concern program
Plant monitoring for Forest Preserve staff purposes: Debbie Antlitz
Controlled burns: John McCabe and Steve Ochab
Invasive species control: Eriko Kojima, Forest Preserve staff, and Friends of the Forest Preserves
Website and Facebook: Eriko Kojima and Stephen Packard
 
You might think this list implies “more than enough people.” If fact, much important work doesn't get done. Many more people would make for fewer losses and more successes. There’s more than plenty of room for new partners to take on responsibilities they might be interested in. Good mentorship is offered. 
 
Acknowledgements

Thanks to Eriko Kojima and Christos Economou for proofing and edits.