Where The Sky Began: Land of the Tallgrass Prairie

4. The Far Gardens

4 The Far Gardens GRASS AND SKY WOULD BE ENOUGH. With only those, the summer prairie would be a smiling, running spread of cloud shadow and wind pattern. But the tall prairie goes beyond that. From the first greening of spring to the full ripening of autumn , it is spangled by a vivid progression of flowers-a rainbow host that first enamels the burned slopes of early spring and ends months later with great nodding blooms that rise above a man's head. Sometimes as secret and solitary as jewels, but often in broad painted fields, the prairie flowers come on -lavender, indigo, creamy white, pink, coral, gold, magenta, crimson, orange, and palest yellow and blue, their flowers tending from ice to flame. Unlike those woodlands that do much of their blooming in spring, tall prairie blossoms through all the green months and into autumn. There are also likely to be more species of flowers in a tall prairie than in woodland of the same latitude. And while woodland flowerscarpet galleries among the trees and can rarely be seen beyond the middle distance, prairie flowers reach out in a long perspective -their vistas often limited only by horizons and acuity of vision. In early summer I like to sit on a prairie rise with a pair of strong binocu- 82 THE PLACE lars, glassing a foreshortened landscape in which flowers and birds are closely compressed-a half-mile of color and motion distilled into a few hundred yards. You can't do that in most woods. The prairie flowerscome on in waves, each in its own time, some blooming briefly and others persisting for weeks. Except for a short period early in the growing season, the flowers must compete with a rising tide of grasses. The smallest and most delicate appear during spring, while those of late summer and early fall are usually taller and coarser-although there are a few stalwarts in spring and some delicate blossoms hidden in the deep grasses of late summer. All may begin growing at about the same time; some just mature much later than others, needing months of growth if they are to compete with the towering August bluestem. Spring or fall, prairie flowers are as tall as they need to be. The first are prevernal, "before spring," and like their cousins in the woods they finish their blooming and fruiting cycle before heavy canopies begin to close over them. Most of these earliest prairie flowers appear before mid-May and are never much more than six inches tall. The best-known is the pasqueflower, with tulip-like blooms ranging from white to pale lavender, its stem and leaves wearing a dense covering of fine silken hairs. It gives the impression of a small flower trying to keep warm and having a tough time doing so, for pasqueflowers may bloom on bare, exposed crests of old glacial moraines while there are still patches of snow on the sheltered slopes behind them. Brave little flowers, often braver than I. More than once, the lowering skies and sharp gray winds of late March have hustled me off the prairie before I'd finished photographing the first pasqueflowers. But no matter -at such times their blooms are usually closed, anyway. Another of the prevernal flowers is prairie cat's-foot, Antennaria neglecta. The scientific name is useful here, for this The Far Gardens 83 plant belongs to the "pussytoes7'genusAntennaria and not to the "catfoot" genus Gnaphalium. Confusing? Keep going. One of the names for pasqueflower is "prairiesmoke," which is also a common name for purple avens. And a common name for purple avens is "old-man's whiskers," although there's a type of tree lichen in the West that's called "oldman 's beard," which also happens to be a Missouri name for the fringe tree. It's all part of a wild game of semantic PingPong in which the referees speak Latin and Greek. Anyway, out there along the bleak swells of early spring prairie the white, woolly mats of cat's-foot are returning, and that's what counts. Some of the leaves may have remained alive all winter, and now, in early April, they are putting up short stems and the pale, furry, clublike blooms that reminded some forgotten plant-namer of the curled paws of a white kitten. Spreading by stolons, these odd little flowers often form large...