Parallel Prairies in Ann Arbor

Most summers in recent years I've traveled to Ann Arbor for a reunion performance with a jazz/latin group I've played with since 1983 called the Lunar Octet. It's also a chance to see my old neighborhood down along Easy Street, where our first house came with a beautiful garden of poppies, delphiniums, blue thistles, Miscanthus grasses and other perennials. These I loved and tended to, though by the time we headed to North Carolina my gardening interests had shifted strongly towards native plants. I have a friend in that old middleclass neighborhood who in many ways lives a life parallel to my own. Jeannine Palms leads the Wet Meadow Project, which in collaboration with volunteers and city staff has transformed much of the nearby sprawling turfdom of Buhr Park into native wet meadows designed to catch runoff. She often gets kids to help out, and calls them "superswampers."

The project is flourishing, with many of the prairie species we have, like sweet bergamot, and a few we don't see here in central NJ, for whatever reason.

Gray-headed coneflower is one of the midwestern species whose range doesn't quite extend to New Jersey. You'll see in the lower left corner of the photo some Queen Anne's lace, a non-native which Jeannine almost certainly works to limit in her wet meadows. It's a pretty flower, but a trip to the midwest makes one realize how it tends to take over in ways we have not yet seen in New Jersey. Other invasives of midwestern fields, like teasel and spotted knapweed, have yet to become extensive in the east to my knowledge, but it may only be a matter of time.

Some of my favorite prairie wildflowers are Silphiums that are much more numerous in the midwest, like rosinweed, compass plant, cupplant and prairie dock. The bright yellow flowers rise on tall stems out of the enormous basal leaves of prairie dock.

The towering Silphiums in the background are cup plant, a species that we now have in Princeton at the Riverside Elementary gardens and our Herrontown Woods botanical garden.

Along with some of the Silphiums, like the big leaves of prairie dock in the background, Ann Arbor's meadows also have some very attractive goldenrods that have the desirable quality of not spreading aggressively underground. Stiff goldenrod (not yet blooming in the foreground) is one of these, as is showy goldenrod.

During my visit this past month, I arrived late for one of Jeannine's workdays, just in time to find her walking home with a young assistant--a girl full of wonder at the natural world. They had been hanging some tallow soap in the Edible Forest--yet another patch of grass that Jeannine had transformed into a botanically rich oasis for the community. She had heard that the soap will deter deer. We saw a hawk land in the very top of a tall evergreen tree in the distance, making an insistent, plaintive sound that could have been the hawk's prey or the hawk itself. We wondered whether it might have a nest there. When it flew over to a a telephone pole, a rodent hung from its talons--all part of a food chain that Jeannine nurtures with her native wet meadows.

The Wet Meadows Project Turns 25

It was in southern Michigan that I first fell in love with prairie and savanna habitats, and so a favorite place to visit, when in Ann Arbor for a gig, is the Children's Wet Meadow Project in Buhr Park. There was a time when tall grass prairies extended into southern Michigan, with stately bur oaks sometimes rising above to create savannas. The persistent grass stems and oak leaves would invite what I call "mildfires" to sweep through, recycling nutrients and creating a clean slate for the next year's growth. And so some of these wet meadows are burned annually by professionals, while neighborhood families gather some distance back to enjoy this controlled, elegant horticultural show that speaks to a wild past. Kids then scatter wildflower seeds in the ashes.

The story of the wet meadows, now in their 25th year, grows out of the transformative relationship between one woman, Jeannine Palms, and the park that serendipitously stretched beyond her backyard.

I've written about it in other posts, about how her love of people, plants, and the local Mallett's Creek spurred a community initiative to turn turfgrass into native grassland. Since Jeannine ran a daycare for many years, this has very much been a kid-powered project, as can be seen during workdays and in the signs that explain how the meadows filter runoff headed for the creek.

A favorite prairie grass is little bluestem. It's always seemed like fall colors of prairie grasses are more vivid in the midwest. Perhaps a colder climate plays a role? The most brilliant example is Indian grass, whose bright orange and yellow mimic the flames that sometimes consume it.

Milkweed, anyone? Common milkweed spreads underground. A mildfire clears away the dead stems without harming the roots.

Dead stems can be as beautiful as the flowers. New England aster, wild bergamot, and the red leaves of blackberry mix with Indian grass.

After planting many wet meadows, the Wet Meadow Project began creating a food forest, to the right in this photo, with trees bearing apples, cherries and pawpaws, a grape arbor, raspberries, and many other edibles. 

Though a native meadow can be low-maintenance, it still requires ongoing vigilance to pull invasive species before they get established. A food forest, too, is only as good as the care it receives.

And sometimes that care involves using targeted treatment of weeds with herbicide. The food forest may well be organic, but a habitat is different from an organic farm. You can't till or mulch a prairie to control invasive plants. It's more like a body that may sometimes require medicine. In this case, low toxicity herbicide was applied to woody plants that, in a prairie, are considered weeds.

It looks like they made an exception for one very special tree--a native chestnut, which was planted in one of the meadows.

The local wildlife has a casual presence. What appeared to be a large green ant was crossing the asphalt path that winds through the park. It turns out to be variously named an oil beetle or blister beetle, Meloe campanicollis, though I must not have disturbed it enough to prompt it to secrete the oil that could blister my skin.

A hawk (red-tailed?) seemed unperturbed as we walked by.

Congratulations to Jeannine and all the other volunteers who have brought prairies back to life in Buhr Park.

The Evolution of the Front Lawn in Ann Arbor, MI

Back when I was writing and performing climate theater, it was a very useful exercise to view things like the earth or the economy as characters. Upon reflecting on what sort of character a front lawn might be, I realized that the expanse of mowed grass is much like a trophy wife for the House. Expected to be well manicured, passive and forever young, the front lawn serves no other purpose than to present a flattering view of the House to the public. In return for its submissiveness, the front lawn is allowed, and in fact expected, to remain perpetually idle. Any shift away from bland formality, such as a wildflower meadow or, heaven forbid, a vegetable garden, would be unbecoming and steal attention away from the House. It seemed to me the front lawn could benefit from a good turf therapist who could help her sort through how she ended up in such a one-way relationship, and from that developed a monologue called Turf Therapy. 

It's easy to knock suburban culture's striving for a sterile deep green conformity, and the chemical dependency and noxious lawn equipment that keeps it propped up. But most homeowners find themselves completely unprepared to own land, and the myriad kinds of plants that grow upon it. No surprise, then, that people try to turn the outdoors into as simple a landscape as possible, essentially an extension of the indoors. A lawn is the equivalent of a wall-to-wall carpet. 

In our era, the expansion of the suburban lawn has coincided with a shrinkage in knowledge of plants. Each generation sprouts more distant from ancestors who farmed or foraged. And how many schools teach children to identify even the most common trees? 

It's a brave homeowner, then, who dares take a shovel to the front lawn, bucking conformity to plant something more colorful, beneficial, and interesting. Usually, the change is wrought incrementally, expanding flowerbeds a little at a time. 

While most plantings tend to hug the edges and stick close to the house, in this yard a Salvia is boldly asserting itself right out in the middle of the yard.

Just down this street, which happens to be called Easy Street, someone dug a raingarden that catches water piped to it from the roof. They used the dirt dug out of the hole to build a berm on the downhill side, expanding the hole's capacity. The wildflowers feed the pollinators while the signs feed passersby with ideas, like Public Power, in which a town takes ownership of its electricity and moves rapidly towards 100% renewable energy.

A neighbor further down has converted even more of the yard to raingarden, and added a sign from the local watershed association: "Rain Garden: Improving wildlife habitat and water quality in the Huron River one garden at a time." This is a nice sentiment that all too often remains on the fringe, but in this neighborhood it has caught on.

Next door is a vegetable garden in the front yard. It's starting to look like the trophy wife has decided to pursue a life of her own. Any House with an ego is going to be really upset.

This homeowner, a friend of mine named Jeannine, has nurtured a burr oak savanna habitat in her front yard, with an understory of trilliums, plus black cohosh in its full mid-summer bloom. The House? Well, it's back there somewhere, having to accept that yards like to express themselves and have meaningful lives, too. 

Interestingly, some of her bur oaks are getting tall enough to start interfering with the solar panels on their garage. She has started managing her front yard forest, removing larger trees while keeping smaller ones not tall enough to shade the panels. It's a way of having your trees and panels, too. Each tree removed leaves a legacy of roots--a network of carbon consumed from the air and injected into the ground.

Even in more upscale neighborhoods, where homeowners can afford to hire landscapers, many yards are cared for by crews that carefully weed the wildflower meadows, displacing the noisy custodial crews that "mow, blow, and go." What a pleasure to bicycle through a lovely neighborhood with colorful, botanically interesting yards and a delicious quiet. Machines to suppress vegetation are replaced by skilled intervention to steer vegetation. All week in Ann Arbor, the neighborhoods were remarkably quiet. I looked online for information about bans on leaf blowers, and could only find a ban on 2-cycle lawn equipment in the city's downtown, passed in 2019.

The shift from lawn to meadow in many yards was surely inspired in part by the work of Jeannine Palms, who with her preschool kids, neighbors and town staff have carved native wet meadows into what had been a vast expanse of turfgrass in nearby Buhr Park. 

Their meadows have many of the same wildflowers we have in Princeton, with some differences. The photo shows gray-headed coneflower, which is close in appearance to our cutleaf coneflower. And they have additional kinds of Silphium (rosinweed, prairie dock, compass plant), and a grass called smooth cordgrass. 

More recently, Jeannine has led a volunteer effort to shift even more of the park away from turfgrass, in this case to create a food forest packed with grapes, apples, pears, elderberry, pawpaw, currants, raspberries, strawberries, fennel, and a "three sisters" planting of corn, beans and squash. 

Here's an effort to grow sweet potatoes, not only for the tubers but also for the leaves, which are delicious. Fabric is spread on the ground to suppress weeds, and fencing suspended above to deter the deer. 

The story of this heroic transformation is told in a sign posted next to the first wet meadows. In the process, they have brought diverse, edible life back to the land and the neighborhood. 

A Wet Meadow is Born

It looks like a barren expanse, essentially an acre-sized bowl of brown, just down from the parking lot at Smoyer Park.

But look at it with a vision for what could be, and you'll see not so much the present as the future. The photo below is a wet meadow in Ann Arbor's Buhr Park, where some portions of vast turf were regraded and planted so that runoff from nearby streets and homes can be filtered through native grasses and wildflowers, and seep down into the groundwater, which in turn feeds the local creek. Function and beauty, all in one. Much of its beauty owes to the ongoing care provided by a friend and dedicated neighbor of the park, Jeannine Palms.

Meanwhile, in Princeton's Smoyer Park, rainwater flows down the broad parking lot towards the basin,

Where it ponds and slowly seeps, in or departs through a small aperture in the outlet. Each inundation adds to an underground reservoir to sustain the deep-rooted natives through any drought--a resilience all the more relevant as climate change brings more weather extremes.

There was some suspense, in early summer, whether the seeds for this meadow-to-be would respond, but some timely rains came and the black-eyed susans sprouted, along with a substantial portion of the fifteen or so other native species in the seed mix.

The project is a coordinated effort that was initiated by yours truly and given the go-ahead this past spring by Princeton municipality. Partners for Fish and Wildlife, a federal agency that has done other good deeds in Princeton and across the state, prepared and planted the ground, at no expense to the town. The Rec department put up No Mow signs, and the nonprofit I lead, the Friends of Herrontown Woods, is charged with doing the all-important maintenance.

Thus far, that maintenance has involved spending a pleasant evening hour now and then, doing some light weeding. Passersby stop to ask what's going on, and are happy to hear the park will soon have a little color to go with the broad expanses of ballfields.

The planting has brought back memories of the first garden I ever planted, a 2 x 6' grid of different garden vegetables. I'd look at it every day after school to witness the changes. Each new leaf was a revelation (So that's what a carrot leaf looks like!).

This time, it's plants that are more likely to feed birds and insects, but each new bloom gets celebrated just the same. This is the first Indian grass flower opening. They have golden anthers that can create a subtle but beautiful effect when massed.

First wildflower to bloom was partridge pea, a native that should replace all the highly invasive, exclusionary Chinese bushclover used by various states for erosion control.

Though the native grasses put much of their first year's energy into building a root system, many have now bloomed. Here's a big bluestem, whose branched flowerheads give it the name "turkey foot". Big bluestem and Indian grass, found here and there in NJ, are the same species that dominate the tall grass prairies of midwestern and plains states.

This is side oats grama, a shorter grass that I don't associate with eastern piedmont, but is often found in seed mixes for meadows.

I had to be fast with the camera to photograph this first black-eyed susan flower,

because most are being chowed down by the deer. Hopefully when the grasses become thicker, the deer will be less thorough with their browsing.

There's a lot of variability in the density of the new plants, but even the seemingly bare spots have grasses sprouting.

Identifying which grasses to weed out requires a close look. Generally, the grasses that spread out horizontally, like crabgrass, are the weedy annuals to be pulled before they go to seed.

Foxtail also is also getting pulled. It grows more vertically,

but even without the seedheads can be distinguished because it's fleshier than the leaner looking native grasses, e.g. the one in the foreground of this photo.

Pilewort is a native I tend to weed out, along with 3-seeded Mercury.

Amaranth is another which, if allowed to go to seed, could grow to shade out the intended plants next year.

To be able to do this light sort of weeding at the outset gives a wonderful sense of control. So often, there's a delay in intervention, the weeds assert themselves, and the gardener/land manager scrambles to steer a stampede of plants.

Evenings are peaceful at Smoyer Park, bringing back memories of childhood pickup games of softball or soccer, played until the day had no more light to give.