Prairie Birthday

An excerpt from an essay in Sand County Almanac entitled 'Prairie Birthday'.

It is an ordinary graveyard, bordered by the usual spruces, and studded with the usual pink granite or white marble headstones, each with the usual Sunday bouquet of red or pink geraniums. It is extraordinary only in being triangular instead of square, and in harboring, within the sharp angle of its fence, a pin-point remnant of the native prairie on which the graveyard was established in the 1840's. Heretofore unreachable by sythe or mower, this yard-square relic of original Wisconsin gives birth, each July, to a man-high stalk of compass plant or cutleaf Silphium, spangled with saucer-sized yellow blooms resembling sunflowers. It is the sole remnant of this plant along this highway, and perhaps the sole remnant in the western half of our county. What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.

Aldo Leopold would be pleased to know that the compass plant, and many other prairie plants that he wrote about are blooming still in the little cemetery just off Hwy 12 here in Wisconsin. I love that because of the angle of this cemetery fence a small remenant of native prairie land was preserved.