Reading Pictures

Prairie Orchids

It’s easy to feel a religious awe for the eastern prairie white fringed orchid when your face gets close to it. The purity, frilliness, aroma, and the elegant biology of its many parts, for many people, all together add up to repeated epiphanies.

Then, stepping back, looking at the ecosystem context, you have the opportunity to weigh the interplay between modern and timeless processes. The photo shows an ancient prairie, infested by buckthorn, threatened by people, watched over by people.

Tips of prairie grass leaves are everywhere, but now in July they’re still shorter than the orchids, smooth phlox (pink), and the broad leaves of prairie dock.

Small round leaves, front and center, represent the cancerous invasion of alien glossy buckthorn. The bush (top right), which looks like a native dogwood, is no less an ultimate danger than the buckthorn. In the absence of fire, shrubs and trees destroy the prairie, totally eliminating all its plants and animals.

But too-frequent fire in all parts of the prairie would wipe out many specialized plants and animals that depend on what transpires in the years without fire. So people cut as much buckthorn as possible, and some of the native woody plants as well, to make do for the smaller patches of nature in modern times.

Good science, wise management, and wonderful work protect our epiphanies.

The eastern prairie white fringed orchid, once on the brink, now increasingly flourishes thanks to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife recovery program headed up by Diana Granitto. Our knowledge of this species has been enriched through studies by Marlin Bowles of The Morton Arboretum. Photo by Doug Sherman. Words by Stephen Packard.

Related Article:

Rare Plants Rise Up! CW, Spring 2005