Brother, can you spare an (old) parking lot
Suddenly, I'm in love with prairies
07/17/2009 4:50 PM
photo by Bonnie McGrath
photo by Bonnie McGrath
I spent a couple of great
hours in Glenview this afternoon.
In a real prairie, a little piece of nature that has been
untouched for hundreds, if not thousands of years. A true preserve.
I got to see what it really looked like when European settlers got here
and had to traverse the tall grasses, flowers and bushes and shrubs that make
up our real natural landscape in Illinois.
My friend Charlotte picked me up at the Wilmette train station and transported me to James Woodworth Prairie Preserve (named after a Chicago mayor). Charlotte co-wrote the “Prairie Directory of North America”--and has a front and back yard at her house in Wilmette that is so native and natural and indigenous that she inspires the wrath of many neighbors who prefer manicured lawns, fertilizer and border plantings of colorful annuals.
Charlotte is able to name all the plants at the preserve, which through a series of circumstances through the years has remained virgin prairie, despite decades next to a miniature golf course and a current life on a dreary strip of rundown restaurants and fast food establishments along Milwaukee Avenue. The land that the golf course was on is being restored to prairie, too--and it has an interpretative center on it, as well. We were supposed to help cut out invading plants (from places like Europe and China) but we spent so much time looking and talking--to a University of Illinois professor who oversees the whole operation who was working, too--that I never got a chance to use my brand new virgin pruners which I bought at South Loop Ace on State Street on the way to the train.
So what’s the connection to the South Loop Observer here? Other than bringing (albeit not using as a volunteer) a pair of pruners from the South Loop?
Well, I am dreaming of all the empty lots in the neighborhood that for now are unbuilt and otherwise unused, without plans for new high rises, townhomes or other structures--or even parking lots--on what’s left of old railroad land, pre-fire neighborhoods and torn down vice district quarters. Lots where “weeds” like fleabane and compass flower and milkweed strive to come through but have no tender restoration buffs to help them get a foothold and bloom into a new old prairie.
The old Dearborn Park 2 garden club? The Dearborn Park Advisory Council? South Loop Neighbors? Anyone want to take up the cause? There’s a bee balm crying somewhere that needs you.
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By YOR Health
Posted: 04/28/2013 1:21 PM
We should share to our siblings what we have. That is what family is all about, loving and sharing. - YOR Health
By Melody from Pilsen
Posted: 08/08/2009 8:38 PM
I know what you mean. There is a fantastic prairie growing in an empty lot on S. Peoria between 16th and 18th Streets. Sometimes I even hear insects when walking by in the evening. Unfortunately someone keeps cutting it back down just when it starts to look really beautiful. Sadly, it is the lack of funding or permits (for a new condo mega-complex) that created this open space. Who knows how long it will last.
By developers make $$$ off the community, politicians from this happens all over chicago
Posted: 07/18/2009 4:01 PM
If planting more community gardens will keep all of the greedy, connected, campaign giving, return favor from aldermen expecting, developers in the South Loop from building more disgusting, out of touch with the history of the neighborhood, skyscrapers, simply to line their own pockets, then you can count me in.
By judy marcus from palatine
Posted: 07/18/2009 3:21 PM
remember when we were at the u of i in champaign, and i had a class assignment to go sit in a prairie and then write about the experience? you went with me, and we sat there for hours. that was when i began my love affair with prairies.
By Charlotte Adelman from Wilmette, Il
Posted: 07/18/2009 3:12 PM
Bonnie's wonderful piece should inspire Chicago area gardeners and landscapers to choose native Midwest flowers and plants. These fragrant, colorful, hardy, longlived and beautiful plants need only modest maintenance. Native birds and butterflies rely on regional native plants for specific food and reproduction needs. Monarch butterflies, for example, lay their eggs only on species of native milkweed, including the orange butterfly weed depicted in Bonnie's photograph.
By Deborah McCoy from Logan Square Chicago
Posted: 07/18/2009 1:14 AM
I am dreaming of ... corn fields in some of those empty lots. I want prairies AND corn fields. Walking through tall rows of corn. We can pretend we are in Kansas. One block over we can pretend we are in big sky country. We are the mighty city. We can have our prairie and eat corn too.