Fall 1999



Photo and Synthesis
Photograph and words by Stephen Packard.

An undistinguished photograph of a nice little patch of forest preserve. You might walk through it and get a pleasant feeling for early fall. Then again, if you knew the site well, you might stop to marvel.

The purple flower stalks give the first hint — one of the rarest plants of the region, savanna blazing star. Because no one knew to care for it, this species might have been lost altogether. Judy Mellin tells a bit of its story in Meet Your Neighbors. And like the savanna blazing star, its open oak habitat, until recently, was imperceptibly vanishing from the region.

When a group of restoration volunteers (then called the North Branch Prairie Project) first saw the site of this photo, many rare birds, butterflies and flowers survived in the shrinking openings among the oaks and hickories. Other species, like the freshly rediscovered savanna blazing star, were in the restoration seed mix that the Forest Preserve stewards planted.

In the foreground is a tree — a dead tree, but a good tree. As they planted, the stewards burned parts of the site every couple of years, and cut back the advancing brush. Some of the larger invasive trees they killed by girdling, cutting off a ring of sapwood near the base. The idea of girdling was a shock to some people. But it's an age-old way of thinning overdense trees, an herbicide-free horticultural tool that has been used by foresters for generations.

Check out the dark brush-choked tangle to the left rear in this photo; it shows the fate of unburned areas. Like larger areas throughout our forest preserves, such land is not much good for recreation, or cleaning polluted summer air, or for the rare wildlife of natural woodlands. The gloom of these degradations is also death to the threatened blazing star.

Now brown-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia triloba) blooms here too — not the black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia hirta) more typical of old fields and prairies. The bigger, branchier brown-eyed often likes the shifting edges of the woods. Indian grass, in bloom on the right, would smother out both of these wildflowers in the prairie, in time. But here, in semi-shade, the tall grasses and woodland-edge flowers strike an uneasy balance. Brush grows, driving back both grass and flowers; fire or restoration crews push the brush back; and certain species thrive together for a time in the intermediate light.

One young steward suddenly understood, as the crew cut the brush and made openings to the sky. He said brightly to his Dad, "Oh! I get it. You need the photo to have the synthesis."

This tree died for our sins. Had it not, in fact, been a sin to let the last of our native ecosystems degrade into oblivion on conservation lands? With good stewardship, threatened nature revives as we too are restored and redeemed.

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