Little Blue Stem, Bell

I haven't roamed the remains of the tallgrass prairie areas of the Midwest for almost half a century, but if I ever get the chance to return, at least some of the places where the buffalo roamed will, I'm pretty sure, feel like home. In part, that's thanks to places I know pretty well around home—particularly places like Trustom Pond, where national wildlife officials have restored a remnant of this ecosystem, and the Brown cemetery at the Bell Cedar Swamp preserve, where the Little Blue Stem grasses have headed out and sparkle in the sunshine. If Big Bluestem and Indian Grass are the trees of the prairie—they can be eight-feet tall—then Schizachyrium scoparium is perhaps the most important shrub. Around here, it rarely gets more than three-feet high, but in the autumn, when the intricate, feathery seed heads appear, it makes up in eye-catchiness whatever it might lack in stature. Those seeds will soon be going on wind-driven journeys... and starting new remnants of the Midwest whenever they land in amenable openings in the forest and field edges.