30 minutes
neighborhood
47 degrees
Brr. Colder today. Walked with Delia around the neighborhood. Purple, white, red, yellow flowers all around, even on the sidewalk. The ephemerals don’t last long! Even with the cold wind it felt like spring. My legs are a little sore from the run yesterday, but my back and glutes are fine. I think I’ve turned a corner with my injury.
before the walk
What’s the difference between a meadow and a field? Looked it up and found this:
A field is used more often to describe an area managed by people. The field before you was once an orchard and pasture belonging to a farmer. A meadow is used to describe a wild area.
Fields and meadows start when trees have been removed from an area. This can occur naturally with a forest fire or flood, or humans may cut down a forest. Seeds from grasses and weeds take root shortly after and a meadow is born.
Meadows can be large or small and can occur anywhere, including in the middle of a forest, alongside a pond or stream, or in the middle of a highway.
Both fields and meadows are open areas with few or no trees. Grasses, and wildflowers are usually the dominant species. Only a limited number of shrubs and trees are present. When allowed to grow larger shrubs will take over a meadow and after years become a thicket. Thickets become forests as tree species take root. This natural process is known as succession.
Fields & Meadows
My family’s farm in the UP had a big field — the front 40. They once grew potatoes, and rocks. When no one mowed it, trees grew quickly. Not fast enough for me to see a forest, just thickets of scrubby trees that housed black snakes and foxes and mice. The back 40 field was a pasture for grazing cattle.
Abandoned orchards reminds me of a favorite essay by Wendell Berry, “A Native Hill.”
I’m inspired by these lines: “When allowed to grow larger shrubs will take over a meadow and after years become a thicket. Thickets become forests as tree species take root. This natural process is known as succession.
succession
A meadow becomes
a thicket. A thicket
becomes a forest.
A forest returns
to meadow. A meadow
grows into a thicket.
A thicket remembers
its forest.
And what about an oak savanna?
An oak savanna is a community of scattered oak trees (Quercus spp.) above a layer of prairie grasses and forbs. The trees are spaced enough so that there is little to no closed canopy and the grasses and forbs receive plentiful amounts of sunlight. The savanna is often thought of as a transition system between the tallgrass prairie and woodland environments, but may contain species that are found only in it and not in either forest or prairie. As a result, it is an important and diverse system containing species from both woodland and prairie, but containing some species that is unique to only savanna.
Once common in Minnesota, the oak savanna is now a rare ecosystem. Before European settlement, oak savanna covered roughly 10% of the state, and now there is only a fraction of that left. What happened? Savannas rely on periodic disturbances such as fire, grazing, and drought to flourish. Such disturbances prevent most tree species from establishing themselves and turning the habitat into a forest community. Fire-adapted trees, such as bur oak trees with their thick, corky bark, and prairie grasses are resilient to fire and do well in environments where fire is a common occurence.
Without fire, tree saplings begin to grow in the savanna and are able to take over, shading out and eliminating the grass and forb species. Soon, where there used to be an oak savanna, there is now a woodland habitat. Oak savannas have become rare because settlers suppressed fires. Farming and development has also helped obliterate the oak savanna ecosystem.
Oak Savanna
Reading about oak savannas, and pastures too, I came across the word, “forbs.” What are forbs? “A forb or phorb is a herbaceous flowering plant that is not a graminoid (grass, sedge, or rush). The term is used in botany and in vegetation ecology especially in relation to grasslands and understory. Typically, these are eudicots without woody stems” (wikipedia).
after the walk
And now I’m thinking about prairies. According to this site, the difference between a savanna and a prairie is the number of trees — less in a prairie.
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
A prairie alone will do
If bees are few.
(To make a prairies/Emily Dickinson)
Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees
(Wild Geese/Mary Oliver)
And the difference between a prairie and a meadow? For many, they’re interchangeable. For some, prairies have more warm season grasses and meadows have more cool season grasses.
As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so
the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together
and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
(The Meadow/Marie Howe)
Reading up about different grasslands on an Illinois site, I found this curious fact:
Virtually all of Illinois’ native prairies are gone today. Most of the remaining lots of undisturbed prairie are in railroad rights of way, pioneer cemeteries and other spots that were not conducive to farming
What’s the difference: Prairie or Savanna?
With all of the connections drawn between grass and/as graves by poets, I’m particularly interested in the idea of native prairies in cemetaries.