Stand along a roadside or in your yard or in a park. You may think you know where you are, but you don`t.
”You`re standing in Poland or Belgium or France,” Gerould Wilhelm says. ”Almost everything we see that`s green is of European origin.
”Most people who live in Illinois have never seen Illinois. And never will. There are a couple of hundred species that have followed agricultural man around the Northern Hemisphere. As far as our plant life is concerned, we`re living in northern Europe.”
More people are becoming aware of how our heritage of native plants has been lost and ignored, damaged and destroyed, and they are fighting back.
Their focal point often is wildflowers.
Call these folks the Wild Bunch.
They include Wilhelm, a botanist at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle;
Chapman Kelley, a transplanted Texas artist; Jock Ingels, president of the Lafayette Home Nursery, in Lafayette, Ill., population 300, near Peoria;
Marilyn Alaimo, president of Garden Clubs of Illinois; Lady Bird Johnson;
Charles Gouveia, of the Illinois Department of Transportation; Tom Allen, a range ecologist from Texas, and many more, a mix of experts and ordinary people.
The Wild Bunch is helping the hardy native wildflowers push back the European invaders that all but obliterated them. Their successes can be seen along roadsides, in the rough that borders the fairways of golf courses, at airports, in public parks, on occasional vast tracts of conserved or restored prairie throughout the Midwest, and in thousands of gardens.
It`s what was here before the northern European settlers arrived. It`s a lot like what Wilhelm means by Illinois.
”In 1830,” Wilhelm says, ”if you had stood at Ft. Dearborn and looked west, you would have seen an immense prairie with grass as tall as a man.
”These tallgrass prairies were replete with color from wildflowers. They were veritable gardens. From the 15th of May through the 15th of October, they were a panoply of violet and gold and red and blue.
”The vastness of the prairies beggared the imagination of the settlers, who had difficulty describing what they saw. Let me read one description, from an observer in 1835:
” `In some instances the prairies are found stretching for miles around without a tree or shrub, so level as scarcely to present a single undulation. In others-those called rolling prairies-there appears undulation upon undulation as far as the eye can reach, presenting a view of peculiar sublimity, especially to the beholder for the first time.
” `It seems when (the prairie is green), a real, troubled ocean, wave upon wave, rolls before you, ever varying, ever swelling.
” `Even the breezes play around to heighten the illusion, so that here, far from the ocean, we have a facsimile of sublimity which no miniature imitation can approach.`
”Sublime, in those days, meant without peer, the ultimate,” Wilhelm says. ”And over and over again the settlers referred to the prairies as resembling an ocean.
”There`s no other spot like Chicago on Earth. We`re west of a Great Lake and 1,000 miles from our chief water source; most of our rain and humidity come from the Gulf of Mexico. We`re struck with searing, dry winds out of the West in July and August and pummeled in winter by subzero temperatures, often with no snow to protect us.
”We`re living in a land covered for millenia by an immense, grinding ice sheet, which created alkaline silts and clays that hold water tightly. Thus, because our soils, our climate and our geology were different, so were our flora different.”
If you`re not much on esthetics and would prefer some hard-headed, practical reasons to agree, consider that wildflowers and native grasses are enormously more economical than our standard greenery.
Highway departments that plant native wildflowers and grasses on medians and embankments save millions of dollars in watering, mowing and fertilizer costs.
”Native plants require almost no maintenance,” artist and wildflower advocate Chapman Kelley says. ”And here`s something to think about. During the peak summer seasons, half of Dallas` water and even more of Denver`s is used to water lawns.”
Wilhelm, however, thinks the philosophical considerations are just as important.
”I think this sameness (of the European plantings) is perhaps a sad thing. We`re a product of our environments, and creative people are influenced by environment.
”But now Illinois could be anywhere, and yet it was our native plants that created the essence of Chicago and its surroundings. It was all the factors of our environment that shaped this city, that made it what it was. And I believe it`s essential to maintain a richness and diversity of environment.
”We`re working here at Morton to replicate the past, and we`re observing effective results. We have a chance to reverse the trend.”
We have lost or are losing 90 percent of our native plants.
”Some 34 percent are extremely rare or already extinct,” Wilhelm says.
”Another 56 percent are considered `conservative,` which is to say they are plants confined to the natural areas-remnants of prairies or areas similar to settler landscapes. But these lands occupy less than one-half of 1 percent of our total land area.
”So we`re left with little vignettes, scarcely more than an acre here and there. A remnant of yesteryear.”
At one time, every flower was a wildflower. Roses, carnations, gladioluses, all the swanky species.
We human beings changed this. We created new categories. Now there are cultivated plants, which generally means the kind we buy at florists` and see in formal gardens, and introduced plants, which means they were brought here and can include both cultivators and wildflowers.
When we moved flowers from their natural surroundings and began cultivating them, we tended to prefer more flower and less plant, so we bred them accordingly.
The way it commonly worked was that someone would be traveling in a new land and would be attracted to a flower growing wild. The person would take it home. In its new environment, the person would find that the flower needed special care because of the changes in soil and climate.
Some of the arrivals-introduced plants-would squeeze out the native varieties and flourish.
What`s a wildflower?
Floyd Swink, a taxonomist (a specialist who identifies plants) at Morton Arboretum and coauthor of ”Plants of the Chicago Region,” replies: ”It`s not a tree or bush. It can be an annual, a biennial or a perennial.” (An annual grows for a year or less and must be reseeded; a biennial has a two-year cycle; a perennial lives three or more years.)
”There are over 2,200 kinds of plants in the Chicago area, counting weeds, introduced plants, bushes, trees, cultivated flowers and wildflowers.
”We may grow a plant in the garden that is a wildflower in New Zealand or Turkey or some other country. A wildflower can be cultivated and then becomes both. Then you must also distinguish between native and introduced wildflowers.”
Two of the most common wildflowers in Illinois, for example, are Queen Anne`s lace (a white flower) and chicory (blue flower) aren`t natives. Both were brought from Europe.
And a weed?
”If I don`t like a plant where it is, it`s a weed; if it impacts me negatively, it`s a weed,” Swink says. ”It`s a plant that grows where someone doesn`t want it, something that`s out of place to somebody but not to everybody.”
Wild thing,
You make my heart sing.
-From ”Wild Thing,”
a song by the Troggs,
not about wildflowers
A brochure about Chapman Kelley`s spectacular wildflower gardens contains this paragraph:
”Chicago is the Indian word for the Wild Nodding Onion-Allium cernum-the flower that gave the city its name. This hardy perennial thrives in even the most challenging conditions. It is graceful and delicate, yet persevering. The Nodding Onion is one of 47 varieties of wildflowers Chapman Kelley chose to color Wildflower Works I.”
Kelley is the guiding force behind the Chicago Wildflower Works, two spectacular ovals at the north end of Grant Park.
Chapman Kelley is a remarkable fellow, a visionary. A successful painter in Dallas, he became a leader in the wildflower crusade more than a decade ago.
Two of his notable projects in Texas were the planting of four miles of bluebonnets on the strips of land adjacent to runways at Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport and a wildflower garden at the Texas Museum of Natural History at the state fairgrounds in Dallas.
In 1982, Bonnie Swearingen, a Chicago socialite, invited Kelley to Chicago and introduced him to Edmund Kelly, then the superintendent of the Chicago Park District.
The result is the Chicago Wildflower Works, where 47 varieties began to bloom two years ago.
How was this impressive task accomplished? With the help of many volunteers, the expertise of Thomas Allen (a range ecologist who has retired from the faculty of Texas A & M University), and Chapman Kelley`s devotion. That devotion includes the donation of more than $1 million of his own. Kelley puts his money where his heart is, and without either, you could get good odds that city government would still be commissioning feasibility studies.
Kelley is in his Cobbler`s Square apartment/studio in Old Town. Large watercolors of wildflowers are hanging from or leaning against two walls. He is wearing white ducks, white loafers and a shirt the color of a shooting star, a pink wildflower native to Illinois. He has a salt-and-pepper beard and smokes a pipe.
”The arts,” he says, ”can and should play a more central part in our lives.”
He considers the Wildflower Works a work of art as well as an experiment in propagating these plants: ”It`s a painting, not just a garden, and I`m happy that so many people react to it that way.”
Kelley believes we are in the midst of ”wildflower mania,” as more people discover the subject.
”People tend to think it`ll be fast, easy and cheap, but it isn`t,”
Kelley says. ”Getting wildflowers started is very difficult, very challenging. There`s so much we don`t know. It`s a lot of trial-and-error. I`m a babe in the woods at this, but I`m learning all the time.”
In 1982, Lady Bird Johnson donated 60 acres near Austin, Tex., and $125,000 to establish the National Wildflower Research Center.
Annie Paulson, a botanist at the center: ”There`s a growing interest in and possibly a trend toward wildflowers. It stems from the conservation movement of the `70s. People are more aware of the environment.
”We try to retrain the way people look at the land. Most of us are used to the well-manicured, groomed, controlled look of the European garden. When you grow wildflowers, it`s going to look wilder.”
