It's a jungle out there

It's not a particularly good picture, but it'll have to do. That's our house up there at the top, maybe fifty yards or so away from where I'm standing. What's between us is five years' worth of sweat and toil and the glorious result of more rain than we normally get, thanks (right now) to global warming. It's prairie, revisited. 

We've got an acre out here, too much to mow, so we decided to take a chunk of it--about a third--and do it up with native grasses and flowers--actually sew it, like Boaz, tossing out the precious seed (it's not cheap) with saw dust to make the job easier. Then, under the tutelage of a friend who really knows what he's doing, we raked the seed into the soil just a bit and let it grow. 

The first year, as per my instructions, I set my mower up as high as it would go and simply mowed the entire plot, as if it were the lawn we determined not to have. Second year, same, although I let up earlier. The idea was to let those native plants grow roots because, good night! they do. Holy coneflower, they do. This pic from the land institute gives you a sense of perennial native roots.

The third year I let the whole mess grow and battled the Russians all year, thistle that is, which is not to say I didn't the year before or once again this year. Adam undoubtedly had native prairie, but, post-fall, he also had weeds, scores of 'em. There's a ton of sweat in that plot of prairie. 

The fourth year things started popping, but an August hailstorm took out our garden and left the prairie sadly drab. Bit then this year, five years after casting that seed out almost biblically, we've got color galore and heft and density that's plainly remarkable--and wonderfully beautiful.

And one reason it's especially lovely is the way our little quarter-acre of renewed prairie reminds us of what this eco-system, now almost entirely gone, once looked like. It was an ocean of grass so many witnesses said and wrote, but at the right time of summer, glory hallelujah, it had more color and depth than any sea. No wonder people could get lost in it. It's a jungle out there.

No eco-system in North America is as gone as tall-grass prairie--what reigned here. And no county in Iowa is as devastated as this one--Sioux. It's almost impossible to imagine that once upon time, kids, this is what the world looked like out back.

It's an exotic jungle that isn't exotic at all. It's a painting as new as dawn every morning. It's an artwork that features nothing more or less than the way things were. It's what God looked down upon for eons before we decided to row crop endless acres of corn and soybeans.

Look, I can't say it better than show you: it's just plain beautiful.