Reading Pictures

Physics, Biology, and Wealth

Here, one of the classic scenes of Chicago Wilderness is transformed by winter from a story of biology to one of physics. In times of warmth, last and next summer, this scene exults in rare plants and animals. Now, it is crystals and geology.

The spring, in the foreground, flows no matter how cold the season gets. Spires of ice radiate from the center of grass clumps, a phenomenon of this place. The tufted hair grass blooms each June in the flowing alkaline water, as cool then as it is now.

The bank behind the spring bursts forth throughout the growing season with rare orchids, lilies, gentians, and others. Among them thrive rare dragonflies, butterflies, and bees. Now, the scene waits, its dried grasses and herbs expecting the fires of spring, rare species secure in roots and burrows. This peaty area is the fen proper. Saturated with limey water, building up for more than ten millennia, peat takes the place of soil for fen plants.

In all, this photo shows six layers of rich ecosystem. The two above the fen are sedge meadow and prairie. Then come bur oaks, a collar around three sides of the hill, with rare woodland and savanna biology underneath. Red baneberry blooms in May. And then the hilltop is one of the most exquisite little hill prairies you might ever hope to see. Though ripped for years by rampaging vehicle recreationists with no one recognizing the richness being rent by tires, it’s now protected. Grooved yellow flax, prairie smoke, and pale purple coneflower are among the treasures from the patches of original prairie that are gradually re-colonizing former vehicle scars.

Architecture of dark-barked oaks makes a visual statement that takes us back hundreds of years. But the hill itself goes back twelve thousand years to when the rapid waters of a river of glacial melt neatly piled this gravel in a conical hill. This kame, one of the distinctive hills of Chicago Wilderness, feeds the rainwaters of this age into the fens below.

I met a hiker on the trail. She said, “I never feel richer than when I walk here.” For many of us, the physics, biologies, metaphors, and people of nature are among of the deepest wealths of our lives.

Photograph by Mike MacDonald/ChicagoNature.com.
Words by Stephen Packard. Bluff Spring Fen protected by
the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago,
Forest Preserve District of Cook County, Bluff City Cemetery,
Illinois Nature Preserves Commission, and Friends of the Fen.

Related Articles:
Into the Wild: Bluff Spring Fen Nature Preserve, CW Spring 1998
Restoring the Butterfly Tapestry, CW Summer 2004
Spring Run, Marsh Marigolds, Bur Oaks, CW Spring 2006