The Willa Cather Memorial Prairie: An Art-Inspired Restoration from the Nebraska Plains

"This country was mostly wild pasture and as naked as the back of your hand. I was little and homesick and lonely and my mother was homesick and nobody paid any attention to us. So the country and I had it out together and by the end of the first autumn, that shaggy grass country had gripped me with a passion I have never been able to shake. It has been the happiness and the curse of my life."

—Willa Cather in an interview published in the Omaha Bee, October 29, 1921

Willa Cather, the renowned author who won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel One of Ours, was born in Virginia in 1873. When she was nine years old, she and her extended family moved to Webster County, Nebraska, just northwest of Red Cloud. Years later, Cather would write My Ántonia, Song of the Lark, and many other stories that are evocative portrayals of life in the Great Plains (Figure 1).

Today, Red Cloud is home to the largest living memorial to any American author. Located just seven kilometers south of there, the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie consists of 243 ha of unbroken natural grassland. The Willa Cather Foundation's acquisition of this rare tract of native prairie from the Nature Conservancy in 2006 was an important addition to a number of sites that are restored and preserved because of their association with Cather's life and work.

The Prairie is classified as loess, mixed-grass prairie (Kaul et al. 2006), but it is located very near the east-west transition between the tallgrass prairie of eastern Nebraska and the mixed-grass prairie to the west. Another transition also takes place nearby: the Republican River is often cited as the boundary between southern (or calcareous) mixed-grass prairie and the northern mixed-grass prairies that extend from Nebraska through the western Dakotas. The unique location of the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie blends species that are at the southern edge of their range with those that are at the northern edge.

The Willa Cather Foundation faced a number of challenges upon acquisition of the Prairie. Cool-season non-native grasses such as smooth brome (Bromus inermis) and Kentucky bluegrass (Poa pratensis) were overabundant, and wildflower abundance and diversity were low because of past overgrazing and broadcast herbicide treatments. Infestations of 6,000–7,000 trees, primarily eastern redcedar (Juniperus virginiana) and Siberian elm (Ulmus pumila), and shrubs such as sumac (Rhus spp.) and buckbrush (Ceanothus cuneatus) were due to fire suppression.

Prairie restoration to its pre-1900 condition is true to the Foundation's mission to promote and preserve the life, times, sites, and work of Willa Cather and is funded largely by a three-year grant from the Nebraska Environmental Trust. The project is guided by the Prairie Management Committee consisting of biologists, agriculturalists, and ecologists. The Nature Conservancy remains involved through the establishment of a permanent endowment to support management of the Prairie and with the participation of Christopher Rundstrom, land steward for the Nature Conservancy on the Foundation's Prairie Management Committee.

Figure 1.

Willa Cather reclines on her side sometime in the 1920s in the tall grasses that helped inspire some of her greatest novels.

Photo courtesy of the Archives & Special Collections, University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries

Restoration of the Prairie's delicate ecology focuses on plant and animal habitat as well as surface- and ground-water management. Specific activities include control of noxious weeds (mainly musk thistle, Carduus nutans) and other non-native plants, reintroduction of a variety of plants that will sustain the Prairie, removal of invasive trees, and the practice of patch-burn grazing. Butterfly milkweed (Asclepias tuberosa) and the rare Fremont's clematis (Clematis fremontii) are two examples of native plants currently being propagated (Figure 2). To date, over 7,000 trees have been removed, creating a view of the wavy grassland all the way to the horizon—an essential characteristic of the Nebraska prairie that Cather so vividly described.

After more than 15 years without...