Summer 1998

[TEXT ARCHIVE WEB-PUBLISHED MARCH 2002.
ORIGINAL PRINT PUBLICATION DATE: SUMMER 1998.]

Ray Schulenberg: Prairie Doc

By Barry Dredze

In 1962, Ray Schulenberg accepted an assignment from the director of the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, to propagate a planting of native plants within a tract of newly acquired property there. This was arguably the second major ecosystem restoration project in world history — the first being the one at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum in Madison.

A homestead by the 1820s, the site's intense farming led to almost complete soil erosion in the nearly 100 acres that now comprise Morton Arboretum's Schulenberg Prairie. After 25 years of restoration, site manager Craig Johnson says Schulenberg Prairie today is a largely self-sustaining prairie and savanna consisting of approximately 350 native plant species — including endangered or threatened species — such as white lady slipper orchids, sand milkweed, and prairie bush clover.

"I usually try to discipline myself to refer to the Morton Project as a 'planting of prairie plants'," says Schulenberg. "There are still many prairie plant species lacking from it. It doesn't include all the soil microorganisms, all the little insects, mites, fungi, bacteria, and so on, that the original prairie contained, although it has been fairly successful. I'm gratified every time I go back and see how well it has maintained itself and improved itself over the passing of time."

The intense labor that Schulenberg and his hand-trained volunteers invested in the project is legendary, and their tactics served as a model for future projects in Illinois. For the first few years, folks crawled around the property with linoleum knives and pocket whetstones, cutting weeds individually from among the native prairie seedlings. Many of these people became the beginnings of the "the restoration movement" which has spread world-wide from its apparently humble beginnings.

"By the fall of '64, the end of the second growing season, the warm season grasses in the planting had provided enough fuel so that the prairie was ready to be burned," Schulenberg says. They have burned two-thirds of it every year since.

Ray Schulenberg had been concerned with rapidly growing rates of extinctions since he was a child. While traveling around the continent in the '40's, he hung around some Native American communities which led to an interest in a loss of the natural areas along with the loss of Native cultures. He earned his BS degree in horticulture, with an emphasis in landscape architecture, at Iowa State University in 1955 (he was 34 years old), and dreamed of starting his own nursery and raising native plants. However, he landed his initial job with the Morton Arboretum through a professor of his and, once there, he met naturalist May Thielgaard Watts and became interested in prairie ecosystems.

Schulenberg contributed mightily to the early editions of the landmark guide to local wild flora, Plants of the Chicago Region (Floyd Swink and Gerould Wilhelm. 1994. 4th ed. Indianapolis: Indiana Academy of Science). He scoured the countryside for the plant data that makes up the heart of this essential local botany tool. Renowned Morton Arboretum botanist, Floyd Swink, original author of the Flora, points out that Schulenberg also designed the system of maps that show the distribution of each of the Chicago region's 2,530 plant species. Schulenberg's demarcation of a 75-mile radius spreading outward from the center of the Chicagoland grid at State Street and Madison Avenue, spanning 22 counties in four states, has become essentially what many now recognize as Chicago Wilderness.

Schulenberg presently makes his home on a 10-acre plot in his own corner of that Wilderness, along the DuPage River in Wheatland Township near Plainfield, Illinois. Though he is now 77 years old and retired, his own "yardwork" includes caring for a reconstructed prairie of roughly 70 species with his friend David Kropp. Schulenberg's home prairie is both a passion and a mission, where he teaches plant identification by appointment, and where the only fee is the desire to learn. "I am concerned about people who think they can simply plant a few prairie plants on their school ground, on their business property, in their backyard, and succeed with it as prairie," he says. "And they have no idea what is involved in establishing it to where it is a self-maintaining planting of prairie plants.

At a time when proponents of prairies and native plant species butt heads with surging development, Schulenberg strains for hope that these natural communities will not only be appreciated, but preserved and restored. "These little efforts to set aside land as preserves are about the only positive things I can see," he says. "And those preserves are so small in terms of the total acreage that is being so utterly devastated." Schulenberg's words sound grim, but his actions speak louder. His vision and dedication are restoring the spirit of the prairie state.