By: Gordon Lee —
The Bosque Nature Center is comprised of two elements, the pollinator garden and the prairie. The pollinator garden gets most of the attention with maintenance—weeding, watering, planting. The prairie, on the other hand, is largely neglected. New plants sometimes get put in, but the weeds–those plants that are non-native, invasive, and undesirable–take over.
Karen Aho has created a sign with the notable question “why is the prairie so messy?” One reason that prairies are messy is that they are natural, that is, not maintained. There are very few remnant prairies left in the United States. There have been efforts by the Nature Conservancy and other groups to restore some prairies, significant projects in terms of maintaining the ecosystems and their biodiversity.
My understanding of the prairie project at the Bosque Nature Center is that it is intended primarily for education. It is not large enough to become a significant restoration project. What it can do, however, is teach people about the prairie that was once here so that individuals might be moved to make some changes on their own properties to help sustain the flora and fauna of the prairie before it was disrupted by development and agriculture as well as understand more fully the nature of the ecoregion in which they live.
To accomplish the purpose of education, we are working on finding ways to manage the prairie, not so much that it is not “messy,” but so that people will be able to understand the “mess.” It is not only the passers-by but also members of the chapter who go to the prairie to work that need to be able to recognize the elements of the prairie, separating the desirable from the undesirable and adding more desirable plants to the space. To that end, we are considering developing signage that identifies the flora of the prairie and are also considering ways of “managing” the “mess.”
Suggestions are welcome.