A four-acre field in Wheatland Township is once again home to the tall grasses and bright flowers that covered the Illinois landscape in the days before European settlers put down roots of their own.
Restoring the native landscape is a way of life for David Kropp and Ray Schulenberg, who started reclaiming a former farm field on Kropp’s 10.5 acres along the DuPage River shoreline in 1968.
Schulenberg, 76, a botanist retired from the Morton Arboretum, was struck early by the prairie’s wild beauty.
“I knew about prairie, I guess, as soon as I learned to understand human speech,” he said.
An untouched prairie had bloomed near his family’s farm in southeast Nebraska, where deep green grasses and colorful blooms covered land that had never been plowed.
A trip to North Dakota to visit relatives when he was 7 years old gave Schulenberg the chance to watch another prairie bloom.
“I knew from that time on what our land was supposed to be like,” he said.
And he turned his fascination with plant life into a botanical career.
“I was finally able to do something about the prairie in 1962,” the year that Schulenberg’s employer, the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, added 55 acres to its property.
Clarence Godshalk, then director at the arboretum, decided to use the land as a restoration site for the region’s native prairie and put Schulenberg to work on the project. The 50-acre Schulenberg Prairie that bears his name still blooms at the aboretum.
Kropp, 64, a retired landscape architect, was drawn to environmental restoration because “I couldn’t save the world with buildings, but I might be able to save some of the diversity (of life).”
In the 1960s, a mutual friend sent Kropp to Schulenberg to learn about native flora. “Ray had to teach me about plants by the scruff of the neck,” said Kropp, who started from scratch and studied hard.
Kropp’s first prairie reconstruction took place at the home of his parents in Mokena. There, Kropp, his brother John and Schulenberg tore up the family lawn and replaced it with prairie plants.
“We were enthusiastic,” Kropp recalls, “and we were desperate for a place to plant and to learn.”
Fortunately, Kropp’s parents were understanding, and their son’s maiden reconstruction effort stayed put.
Then Kropp began looking for some prairie land of his own.
“I bought a cornfield, just trees by the river,” he said, surveying the gardens outside the home he created in Wheatland Township. “I was just looking for a place where I could learn to raise native plants.”
He bought the land in 1964 and moved there in 1969, fashioning a distinctive home from two historic buildings.
“I originally designed a 21st Century house, but I couldn’t afford (to build) it,” Kropp said.
So over a distance of three miles, he moved a schoolhouse built in 1884 and added another vintage building, this one circa 1871, from Naperville, and created his own unique dwelling. Schulenberg, who worked with Kropp on the prairie project from its inception, came to share the home and help tend the prairie after he retired 10 years ago.
A nodding wild onion, the plant that legend says gave Chicago its name, blooms alongside the front steps, only one of 450 native plants growing on the property.
A winding path leads through the prairie plantings, which have seen yearly additions. Waist-high grasses wave in the wind, and bumblebees, heavy with pollen, drift slowly among the flowers.
The flowering plants bloom above the grasses where they can be pollinated easily, adding notes of bright color, from the delicate pink queen of the prairie to the blazing orange butterfly weed and the magenta tones of the broad-leafed purple coneflower.
That abundance of native plants was not easily come by.
Settlers traveling through the prairie landscape’s thick vegetation brought the seeds of their own European plants, many of which quickly crowded out the originals.
Luckily, those wagon trains included botanists with notebooks as well as homesteaders with plows. Plants can be matched with their native regions “on the basis of several hundred years of research by botanists keeping records of what grows where,” Schulenberg said.
The close-cropped green lawns and lush garden blooms synonymous with suburbia are not growing in their native ecological niche, nor are most of the wildflowers that spring up along country roads, Schulenberg said. “The native stuff is almost gone.”
It takes a lot of hunting to track down the seeds of prairie plants such as swamp milkweed, wild quinine, shrubby cinquefoil, blazing star or big bluestem and little bluestem grasses.
Oddly enough, the railroads that displaced acres of vegetation as they crisscrossed the prairie lands helped keep some of the plants alive. The heat thrown off by the locomotives had the same renewing effect on the soil as the prairie fires Indians once set, Kropp and Schulenberg explained. So railroad rights-of-way became prime seed-gathering spots for prairie restorationists.
Kropp and Schulenberg had to travel around the Midwest to collect native seeds before they could till the soil and plant.
“This has been a 30-plus-year development,” said Schulenberg, who still weeds the land by hand. “Almost everything (we planted) survived. That flora is the basis of our environment. . . . The species that are here evolved here.”
“Diversity is what is achieved by planting prairie,” Kropp said.
The land, which borders the DuPage River, is covered with an amazing variety of plants, including rare species such as the glade mallow, which survives only in alkaline soils near rivers. There are stiff goldenrod plants that mark autumn’s arrival with their golden flowers, mountain mint with tiny white flowers, lavender-tinged wild bergamot and the white wild indigo, which blows away in the autumn breezes, casting its seed to the winds.
The prairie teems with animal life as well. A blackbird perches atop a compass plant, named for its distinctive north- and south-facing leaves. The rattlesnake master attracts a special species of moth. Wild bees gather nectar, and butterflies flutter, while humbler insects shelter beneath the tall stalks and grasses.
And the prairie itself diversifies as the seasons change.
“The color in the prairie is constantly changing” as plants and soil pass through their seasonal cycles, Kropp said.
Schulenberg, Kropp and some volunteers set early spring fires that release nutrients from the soil, clear away the weeds and prevent erosion, providing a fertile growing space.
As spring edges toward summer, the grasses and flowers are back, and by midsummer the prairie is in full, colorful bloom.
Monarch butterflies drop in every autumn to add more color as they dart among the asters and goldenrods.
The monochromatic grays and whites of a snowbound winter still harbor a variety of life: Tree sparrows roost under the remains of vegetation and forage for fallen seeds, while voles and deer mice tunnel warm underground homes for themselves.
Although Kropp and Schulenberg may have been the agents of preservation, the prairie itself is “a landscape selected by time and evolution,” according to Craig Johnson, director of education at the Morton Arboretum.
Their work is especially valuable, Johnson said, because “they understand not only the plants as individuals . . . but more importantly the plants as a community.”
Besides its lively mix of plant and animal life, the prairie is appealing as a place of considerable beauty and a window into evolution.
Preserving the native habitat is a link with the land and its past, with an importance that goes beyond spicing up the local scenery, according to Pat Armstrong of Naperville, whose one-third of an acre blooms with restored prairie instead of the conventional lawn.
“(Prairie) is of world importance because it’s a vanishing ecosystem,” she said.
The virgin North American landscape was covered by vast tracts of prairie extending from Canada southward to Texas and from Ohio westward to the mountains, she said. “It’s continental. It’s not just a local thing.”
Schulenberg and Kropp may have plenty of company in the coming years, according to Lynn Kurczewski, public information coordinator for the Will County Forest Preserve District, who said suburban homeowners are asking how to add native flora to their yards and gardens.
“A lot of people feel it represents a part of our history, our heritage,” she said.
