Nicodemus Wilderness Project -- Global Registry of Apprentice Ecologists

During every week from April to September, plants burst their buds for the first time into the old summer haze, ranging from 10 to 15 every week. In June, as many as a dozen may bloom in a single day. No man can heed these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them. They may haul him, who steps unseeingly on May dandelions up short by the ruddy haze of August ragweed pollen; he who collects his rain check from sodden April courses may skid his car into the prairies of wild geraniums that cling to the roadside. Inform me of what plant birthday a person recognizes, and I shall tell you a passable degree of his vocation, his hobbies, and a general synopsis of his ecological education. Every summer I watch from the window gently placed above the boughs of the Prunus avium in anticipation of the subtle queue. It is time for a prairie birthday, and in one corner of the lot is a surviving celebrant of the once-important event. The lot is only ordinary, with its standard monoculture of grass spanning more than half the length. It becomes extraordinary through the work of a hopeful teen who transformed the beds bordering the house to sleep with a host of natives. Only the weed eater and mower guard the species against abounding past the trimmed edges of the plot. Otherwise, the grass would have lost its war some time ago. This tidy trimming gives birth each July, to an unfathomable man-high stalk of Eutrochium purpureum, Echinacea, Lupinus, and spindles of yellow attached to Rudbeckia hirta. What a thousand acres of Rudbeckia looked like when they tickled the bellies of the bison is a question to never again answer, and perhaps not even ask. Conversely, this year I found the Rudbeckia first in bloom on the 26 July, almost two weeks later than expected; during a decade drawn out to thirteen years, the average date was 15 July. At the start of the decade, the gregarious next door was abridged by daisies, aster, ironweed, milkweed, and the especially charming prairie coneflower. As I pulled into the drive on 5 August, stationed apprehensively atop the neighboring meadow, an earth-moving machine loomed. Predicting the future came easy; a home mostly identical to our own will sit in its place, and the land will be vacant of the prairie epoch. According to the department for transportation, of the 200,000 residents of the county, 100,000 will pass by the development during the three-month period when the Rudbeckia spring to life. In the cars, ride 100,000 who have 'taken' what is called history, and perhaps 10,000 have 'taken' what is called botany. Yet I lack hubris that a dozen or fewer have recognized the Rudbeckia in their residency, and of these, hardly one will notice its demise. If I were to tell the choir of the nearby church that the stick framers have been burning history books in their wake, under the guise of building homes, they would be dumbfounded and without comprehension. How could a weed be a book? For the misanthrope man, he may live in the confine of his books, whose pages document the landscape before Homo sapiens utterly disrupted the flow of the scenery. In his quest to obtain a plethora of knowledge, he may stumble upon the bittersweet truth; this is one song in the funeral of native flora sung. The world chants a chorus of familiarity; our predecessors will tune their craft to the same nature: in pursuit of betterment for the average person. But a mechanized man, oblivious to the flora, is proud of his progress in cleaning up the landscape on which, haphazardly, he must live out his numbered days. It might be wise at once to prohibit the teachings of real history and real botany, lest a future individual suffer despondent thoughts about his floristic price of a good life. An esoteric of the common 'weed' comes, if you are with luck, once in a blue moon. Thus, my floristic standard of living on week ends consists of back roads; where the commotion of betterment has not yet disturbed the forgotten, nor drained, or diked lowland marshes of the Alum Creek Basin. On the week days, I subsist as best as I can on the flora of the roadside ditches, the university campus, and the adjoining suburbs. For a decade I have kept, for pastime, records of the native plant species as a testament to the detriment humans have conceived upon the landscape. So be it apparent the ironclad entrepreneur and his executives are nearly twice as depleted of ecological education as the university student or the congenial observer. Of course, neither sees his role as a savior of flora yet and thus is confronted by two aforementioned alternatives: either insure the continued blindness of the commoner or examine the potent question of plants and progress existing simultaneously.