The Seed Sharers

By Katherine Millett
Photography by John Weinstein

Fifteen families are making a rural wilderness in their own back yards.

The door is open, the sound of laughter enticing, so I let myself into the living room where the Harvard Seed Group is celebrating the return of summer with a potluck dinner. Open windows admit musty, floral scents and an occasional butterfly.

In a corner I see Martin Ford, a robust Englishman with a beer in his hand, greet George Johnson, the gregarious fellow who invited me.

“So, how are the seeds doing?” George asks, raising his own beer in salute. “Did they take?”

Martin looks perplexed. “Seeds?”

George’s face collapses into a lugubrious, comical, frown. “You should have a bag about yay-big,” he says, holding his hand and his beer can a grocery bag apart, “full of seeds and seed heads, all chopped up nice.”

Martin looks skeptical and shakes his head.

“Oh, no,” George laments, and without further warning careens backward and falls over the arm of a chair. Before Martin or I can move to steady him — George turned 80 last May — he returns to vertical with a grin on his face. It’s like a sight gag in a silent movie. “Then I’ll drop a bag by your place tomorrow,” George says calmly, “with about a billion seeds.”

Martin’s eyes twinkle with amusement. “And what, exactly, should I do with them?”

“Just mix them up with a little sand or sawdust,” says George, “and fling them around your best mesic site.”

Everyone in the room, except me, has a mesic site. (In my Chicago suburb, gardeners raise petunias, and dandelions raise eyebrows.) Less wet than a wetland, less dry than an upland prairie, a mesic site occupies the middle ground. A wide variety of grasses, forbs, and wildflowers can grow there, and the Harvard Seed Group intends to see that they do.

The group’s members, for a variety of reasons, bought land near Harvard, Illinois, not far from the Wisconsin border, a decade or three ago. Only the Johnsons, the Evans (who requested their names be changed for this article), the Bangerts, and Randy Stowe had restoration firmly in mind.

“For us,” says Orrin Bangert, “it was wanting to support wildlife and restore natural areas. It helps that the government pays us rent to plant prairie on some of our former cropland. Our neighbors have gotten interested, because when you have a choice between mowing a huge lawn and restoring a prairie, restoration seems very attractive. It isn’t easy, especially at first, but it’s so worthwhile.”

George welcomes new neighbors by giving them bags of native seed as house-warming presents. He defines the group’s goal as “maximum diversity everywhere. We want to get every fragment of land we can back to its original condition, before settlement by Europeans.”

Martin was recruited into the seed group by his wife, Hillary, who took their dog for a walk and met Marie Evans, who was out walking her dog, and who had been restoring her land with her husband, Tom, for many years. (The Evans have been stalwart members of the group almost since it began in 1992.) Such informal encounters have added up, over the years, into a loose coalition with a strong spirit.

They regard the hard work of restoration as creative. At first, I could understand this only in a Rauschenberg-erases-DeKooning sort of way. (Artist Robert Rauschenberg erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning and signed the smudgy paper “DeKooning Erased by Rauschenberg.”) Likewise, clearing away the crops and tiles of agriculture seemed like a laborious effort to remove what someone else had made.

As I came to know the group, I realized that to clear brush and sow seeds effectively, one needs to learn plant names and understand ecological processes, like how water travels and when seeds drop. Applying the knowledge to one’s own land is a creative form of cultivation, an endeavor that demands a steady commitment and a humble attitude. In the company of good friends, it can also be fun.

The group’s collaborations seem as fundamentally Midwestern as barn-raisings. At tonight’s potluck supper, women are working away in the Evans’ dining room, uncovering dishes to release aromas of barbequed chicken, garlic mashed potatoes, and stewed rhubarb. The owner of a nursery passes out bur oak and walnut seedlings. A sign-up sheet circulates, soliciting volunteers to work the next prairie burn.

“I’m the pyromaniac,” says Richard Kirchner, by way of introduction. A tall, trim man, he likes to make people smile. His wife, Diane, says he started burning the thistles and reed canary grass growing around their bur oaks long before George told him it was a good thing to do. Richard, who owns a fire protection company, helps Tom Evans supervise the group’s periodic burns. Every year, a well-trained team uses controlled burns to tip the ecological balance in favor of prairie plants, away from invasive grasses, shrubs, and trees.

Members of the seed group own more than 800 acres and commit about half of them to restoration. Within a five-square-mile area of McHenry County, their holdings are interspersed with a golf course, a monastery, a few farms, and a 1,200-acre chunk owned by movie producer John Hughes. As Marilyn Johnson is quick to point out, this is not joint ownership. “These are people doing things on their private property,” she says. “We cooperate.”

Most of them are retirees who moved north to escape the congestion and commercial bustle of Chicago’s environs. The Johnsons came from Wheaton, the Evans from Long Grove Village, the Bangerts from Woodstock, and the Dankerts from Wayne, where they grew weary of fighting development proposals. Although McHenry County is growing fast, gaining 40,000 people and 13,600 housing units during the last five years, the stampede halts well south of Harvard.

Hilly by Illinois standards, the neighbors’ terrain includes the highest point in the glaciated part of the state. “Highpoint” reaches 1,189 feet.

High means young, geologically speaking. The land is a hodgepodge of clay, silt, pebbles, stones, and boulders deposited by melting glaciers from Canada about 11,000 years ago. The moraine forms a ridge between the Rock River and Fox River watersheds, an elevated area that has not yet had time to carve gulleys and streams. Eventually, its drainage system will mature, but until that happens, rain will collect every spring to make ephemeral wetlands, or vernal pools.

Because the pools dry up later in the summer, they cannot support fish. Instead, they provide critical habitat for frogs and salamanders that need water to reproduce, lay eggs, and grow through the tadpole phase. Without fish to prey on them, these amphibians thrive. The area around Highpoint, containing about 70 vernal pools, hosts one of the highest concentrations of ephemeral wetlands in the Midwest.

To share their wealth of native species, members collect dry seedheads of their most desirable plants, rated on a scale from 1 to 10 according to the quality of the environment needed to sustain them. Stems and all, they run the plants through a machine that chops them coarsely and preserves their microbe and insect cohorts. Next, they sort the results into site-specific combinations. (George made 136 different mixtures one year.) Then they eat chili.

Most years, the chili is served at the home of Renée and Rich Dankert. Standing almost anywhere on their property, one is surrounded by a plethora of colors and textures, clusters, clumps, branches, blades, stars, trumpets, orbs, and cones. The day after the potluck, Renée leads George and me down the slope in back of the house. The pond, she says, attracts sandhill cranes, wood ducks, and snipes. Once, she saw a painted turtle lay eggs in the bank.

Renée feels a special fondness for porcupine grass, because as it dries, it curls into a spiral. She has to move fast to collect its seeds, which drop in a single day. She also collects seeds from gentians. When she and Rich discovered five types of the prairie flower growing on their 25 acres, they hosted a celebration known to insiders as The World’s First Gentian Party.

When we turn a corner, George lets out a yell. “Renée, you have a marsh phlox!” This rare flower, an “8” on the Swink-Wilhelm scale of prairie quality, started out as a thimble-full of seed the group tossed around a few years earlier.

George’s enthusiasm is, to put it mildly, contagious. Before the end of the day, news of this celebrity will spread throughout the group. “Marsh phlox” will be recorded in George’s extensive notes and on Marie Evans’ computerized inventory. Another party may be in the works.

The clearing of brush and the elimination of invasive grasses pose the group’s greatest challenges. With chain saws, burns, herbicide, the right seeds, and 13 years of hard work, Marie and Tom Evans have changed their landscape.

“You couldn’t see the oaks for the buckthorn at first,” says Marie, “but as we pushed back the garlic mustard and the box elders, native plants started to come back. Sometimes the seeds lie dormant for a few years. Then, suddenly, you have something new. It’s exciting.”

Today, 319 native plant species thrive in their sedge meadows, wetlands, and oak-hickory woodland. The Evans’ land was added to the Illinois Natural Areas Inventory in 2005, a tribute, wrote the site evaluator, to the Evans’ “capable and conscientious care.” They are further blessing 54 acres as a Land and Water Reserve.

Another high-quality property contains four “marl seeps.” As we walk through a field to see one, high grass tickles our chins, and tussocks try to trip us. We reach a drop-off. In a small hollow at the bottom of a slope, cool water seeps out of the ground and sparkles as it runs over rocks, stones, and the white film of marl, the calcium carbonate clay that gives the seep its name. There are not many seeps like this in the Midwest.

The land belongs to Frank and Margo Blair, who bought the property to give their children a pastoral experience. Their land has also been designated a state inventory site.

“A marl seep is kind of magical,” says Margo. “It has water all year round, so it is used by lots of animals.” The experience has not been lost on the children. “I loved growing up there,” says Alexandra, 25. “It dictated who I am now and what I want to do with my life.” She earned her college degree in sustainable architecture.

For those who cannot do the hard physical work of restoration, the neighbors are ready to assist. Betsey Bobrinskoy, described by her friends as “a dynamo in her 60s,” is actually 78. She spends weekends in one of the first active solar houses in Illinois, which she and her husband built in 1979. Since her husband died in 1991, she has relied on neighbors to help her maintain her property.

“The burn group comes in and burns my land whenever it needs it,” she says. “They are so wonderful. Prairie restoration has gotten me involved with my neighbors, and I love that.”

Her 20-acre prairie acts as a filter for the headwaters of the Nippersink Creek, one of the cleanest waterways in Illinois. All the land around Highpoint, in fact, has enough ecological significance to command the attention of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the McHenry County Conservation District, which are helping the group apply for grants to finance large-scale brush clearing next spring. “When the neighbors see this,” says George, “they’ll be impressed, and we hope they’ll join us.”

As new members embark on the mission, they help create a legacy for their own children and those of others. Some are working with the conservation district to prevent future development by establishing conservation easements. Others are discovering the spiritual connection to land that germinates during restoration.

“I walk two miles every morning in my prairie,” says Martin Ford, “and it’s never the same way twice. It’s my substitute for going to church.”

There is a sense of “rightness” one feels in a well-restored site. Perhaps the creative impulse resembles the urge to dance, to take one’s place in a dynamic setting, collaborating but not controlling. Given patience and the right conditions, the land’s inhabitants, connected again to each other, proliferate.

Related Article:

Gardening for Seeds, CW, Fall 2001. Includes more on the seed collecting practices of the Harvard Seed Group.