We get some clover in the Indiana prairie, as clover has colonized pretty much every habitat around world that it can survive in. We don’t get as much clover as what is in your picture because the other prairie plants compete for space so you get a lot of different species in a very small area.
By coincidence I took some pictures of our local prairie a couple days ago. They’re on the way to you.
I tried taking a video because I wanted to capture some of the sound, like the birds, and succeeded, but apparently the resulting file is too big for my e-mail. Well, that’s annoying. Now I’m trying to figure out how to move it off my phone.
Our town planted a Miyawaki forest last year. It’s about the size of a tennis court and has a lot of small seedlings. It’s supposed to eventually grow into a forest, but frankly I don’t understand how something the size of a tennis court can function as a forest.
- they planted the UK’s first Tiny Forest in March 2020, and:
Since Witney’s Tiny Forest was planted, Earthwatch has gone on to establish another 16 across the UK. We will be running monitoring days at each of them during Spring and Summer 2021 with local school groups and communities.
By 2023, we aim to have built a network of 150 Tiny Forests in the UK…
The prairie as (?has) woken up! Rain and warmer weather means it has greened up.
This picture shows a variety of plant species, along with the remnants of last year’s (and prior years’) growth.
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As is ever the case with google photos, the image gets trimmed when I post it. Click on the image for the full picture.
The comparison to be made here is with South Central in post #60. By coincidence, the photos (this post and #60) were all taken on the same day. I have to say that, on the face of it, the Wakehurst (UK) version looks like a reasonable copy.
Man, has it been hot round there parts. On Tuesday, the village of Charlwood (about 10 miles from Wakehurst) briefly held the record for the highest temperature ever recorded in the UK (39.1 Celsius)*. (The record was then repeatedly broken in various places throughout the day.) My point here is that, if there was ever going to be a best time for realistically reproducing a prairie in a country with cool summers (usually!), that time is now.
From East to West
Atlantic Coast
South Central
Pacific Northwest
These photos are not meant to be works of art - I’m trying to offer a view of plant types/species present and highlight diversity between the regions (which, to my untrained eye, seems distinctly lacking for AC vs SC, with both being dominated by the same yellow flowers).
Thoughts, guys?
j
* - as Mrs T observed, there was a fair chance of the prairie burning this year - by accident.
What can I say? It is black-eyed susan season. I’ll see if I can stop by my prairie for a comparison picture. Think you also have some field daisies - the petals aren’t “filly” enough to be daisy fleabane. And grass. Can’t tell the exact species from the picture.
By graceful invitation from Treppenwitz, I will contribute to this thread, starting now with a copy and paste from another thread, because I am lazy. That is what I wrote over the other thread with the title “Today in Nature I Saw”:
But what I saw today in nature? I will reveal a secret here: My wife and me have just bought a swamp. Really, not kidding, 1.34 acres of bog, pure morass. The correct term for that kind of marsh in German is Erlenbruchwald (link to German Wikipedia). A moor where alder (German: Erle, thus the name) grow until they fall, because the ground is not solid enough for tall trees. Then they rot. I might start another thread about this place, we are looking forward to getting bitten by mosquitos, falling into ditches, escaping from wild boars, the kind of things you do in fens and mires and muskegs and so on.
And what did I see? First, dryness. All the ponds and draining ditches etc. we saw just one month ago, when we bought it, are dry. The nearby lake, the one we should never reach because it is too swampy on the way there, is reportedly 50 cm lower than usual at this time of year. That is a lot when you consider that lakes around here seldom are deeper that 2 - 3 m, if at all. That the surface is dry and the frogs are gone does not mean that you cannot sink 2 to 3 feet all of a sudden. I almost lost my Wellington Boots!
Second, we saw garbage. We knew that, we went today with several big plastic bags (yeah, I know…) to collect all the plastic, bottles, plastic sheets, shoes, plastic ducks, cans, plastic flower pots, etc. etc. etc. we could gather in a couple of hours. It was a lot. It made little difference. There is a task for the next weeks and months.
But that is OK with us, as cleaning the place is about the only activity allowed there. It is an official Biotop, something like a reserve. Proud to have one now. We probably do not know what a mess we are getting into.
And here is a link to the first four pictures, images of the same spots three weeks ago and today, two and two, from slightly different angles.:
And that little exchange reminded me that yesterday I made a trip out to a microenvironment described in post #1 of this thread:
Violet helleborines are typically found under beech trees on chalk. Years ago I found a colony on …clay, I guess, under conifers and other evergreens. They are confined to an area of just five or six square meters…
There were four spikes, as many as I have seen, I think. One in perfect condition - not the best photo, I’m afraid… (understatement). I was concentrating on getting two spikes in the one shot - bad idea.
As ever, click on the image for the full photo. I’ll try to get back there over the next couple of days and do better.
Bruch means indeed break, but it is also the tecnical botanical term for a marsh forest. There seem to be almost as many words for marsh in German as in English (Merrian-Websters lists the following synonyms of marsh: bog, fen, marshland, mire, moor, morass, muskeg, slough (also slew or slue), swamp, swampland, wash, wetland - and anyone of those may cite even more synonyms!).
I just learned that four weeks ago, I could not avoid spreading the newly gained knowledge. Now guess how I came to learn about that fact… I have been reading!
Back to the drying pond, only some patches of the water lentil seem to survive, most of the surface is turning brownish. Something tried to cross the dry pond and sank quite deep, I guess it was a wild boar (see second picture, the beast seems to be an even-toed ungulate, if I read those muddy prints right). It went right through and did not come back the same way. Imagine if it does not feel nice even for a wild boar!
I’m red-green color blind, so I can have issues with shades of green. The elephant hawk moth photo confused the hell out of me til I realized what was going on.
