Why Iowa...prairies
Tuesday, April 26, 2011 at 8:31PM I had a chance meeting with Iowa author Jacqueline Briggs Martin just before I moved to Iowa from Minnesota. Call me when you arrive, Jackie said, and I'll show you around. She was as good as her word and our friendship grew over picnics and walks by creeks and through prairies.
Jackie is the award winning author of nineteen books for children including her latest, The Chiru of High Tibet, which was chosen as a Junior Literary Guild selection for January 2011 and has been named an Outstanding Science Trade Book for Students K-12. Read about Jackie's journey to Tibet here.
Why Iowa, Jackie?
Prairie is one reason why. Most of our prairie has been lost to the plow, but there are remnants, wonderful remnants, including the Rochester Cemetery, where Mother Button is inspired by a gravestone to give her unborn child the name “Tugs Button.”
This little patch, where the soil has never been turned, really does almost buzz with wildflowers in the spring of each year—shooting stars, columbine, Solomon’s Seal, trillium, even yellow ladies’ slippers on a hidden hillside.
Looking at these flowers you’d think they were the “action” on a prairie. But the real action is underground where the roots and rhizomes go down almost as far as the plants go up, making a dense mat of plant support. That’s why the plants could survive those roaring prairie fires that took down oak trees and sent bison running for their lives. Those roots just lay low and waited, and the next spring sent up another round of green.
We can make a prairie in a few years. Plant the forbs (flowering plants) and grasses, pull the weeds, do an occasional burn. Soon we’ll see flowers. But it takes a hundred years to restore the roots and rhizomes.
Many in Iowa still love these flowers, gifts of time and climate, and are working to restore prairie plants to our roadsides and small pockets of vacant land.
Writers need a place to go to wander, to take in, to add to “the well” from which they draw. A walk in one of Iowa’s prairies does that for me.
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