Extreme gardening

Sometimes things just work out. We had a prairie burn yesterday when no one thought there would be a burn and things just seemed to be going the wrong way all week. As Yi-Fu Tuan notably said, we rarely think it's unfair when good things happen to us. Maybe it was unfair, but yesterday was a good day.

It rained Thursday. Friday was windy. Today it's snowing. But Saturday was an ideal burn day. Low temperature, moderate humidity, light winds. Northwest Airlines managed to deliver Bonnie to Madison Friday night only a few hours late. We managed to get the truck out of the mud Friday afternoon so we didn't make that mistake on Saturday when we should have been burning.

And we got an excellent burn in the woody corner where Bruce and I cut away the brush three years ago, so maybe now the prairie grass will start to re-colonize that corner. It once was oak savannah as is evident from the few large oaks still standing. But it probably had no fire or other attention for over 100 years until we started clearing and now burning for the past two years. Will it come back? Maybe yes, maybe no. It's a mightily hard thing to restore a prairie. You really understand the tenacity of life when you try to extinguish one kind of life in favor of another. Prickly ash, choke cherry, honeysuckle all want to live just as fiercely as do Indian grass, little bluestem and lead plant. We can only tip the balance a little.

This is one difference between gardening as we ordinarily understand it and extreme gardening of the prairie variety. You don't control the landscape, you only tilt the balance of power and depend on time and persistence to make a difference over the long run. The scale is so vast and the forces so large that change can only be incremental. This week we will plant some prairie seed in the areas we burned. Maybe next year some of it will come up. Maybe it will take three or four years.

Maybe some year we will see a profound change. In the meantime, it is the effort and the intention that count. And the glorious hours spent doing nature's work.