Numlock Sunday: Christian Elliott on the hidden pockets of a lost ecosystem

Photo by Joel Holland on Unsplash

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Christian Elliott who wrote Where The Prairie Still Remains for Noēma. Here’s what I wrote about it:

Iowa was once completely covered by prairie, but that native flora has been wiped off the map by the monocultures of corn and soybeans now covering 65 percent of the state’s land area. Less than 0.1 percent of Iowa’s original prairie remains, so discovering rare places where that original ecosystem survived a century of heavily industrialized agriculture is no small miracle. One such place is the “pioneer cemeteries,” or graveyards that have been relatively undisturbed since their occupants entered the pre-exploited prairie. According to the Iowa Prairie Network, there are 136 known cemetery prairies across the Midwest, and the Network is on the hunt for more. Some of those prairie remnants contain as many as 250 species. Almost all the land in Iowa is privately owned, and 60 percent of Iowa’s public land is just the ditches on the side of the roadway. Still, those roadside rights-of-way have seen samples from prairie remnants reintroduced in the 1990s. Some 50,000 acres of roadsides have been planted with native grasses and wildflowers.

This story was sick. I enjoy every story I put into Numlock one way or another, but this one was just so cool. If you haven’t given it a click, there are some really amazing photographs in there that show these remaining bits of prairie and how they contrast with the rest of the environment.

We spoke about pioneer cemeteries, American wildflowers that could only be obtained from the Netherlands, and how to re-wild one roadside at a time.

Christian writes in a lot of places and he can be found at his website christianelliott.me and on BlueSky.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Hey, Christian, thanks so much for coming back to Numlok.

Thanks, Walt. I’m excited to do one of these again.

You had a really, really wonderful story. It was published in a publication called Noema, and it’s called “Where the Prairie Still Reigns,” and I found this super fascinating. It’s about these prairie cemeteries. Do you want to talk a little bit about what got you interested in this phenomenon and where you came from on the story?

Yeah, absolutely. I actually learned about the existence of these prairie remnants on old cemeteries in the Midwest, reporting a totally different story for BioGraphic magazine about a crisis of herbicides drifting onto native ecosystems in the Midwest from crop fields. A scientist that I spoke with for that story mentioned offhand that a lot of these prairie remnants are in cemeteries, and she pulled this book off of her shelf by a really great landscape photographer named Stephen Longmire. He’s based in New York, but had come across this little remnant prairie on a cemetery in eastern Iowa and had dedicated years to photographing it in all seasons, and had written this book.

I tracked the book down just as a side project interest and decided maybe there’s a piece here that I could write about this phenomenon of these prairies persisting on cemeteries. They do that because some 65 percent of the state is now cropland when we’re talking about Iowa, and it was once prairie. Some of the few places that were not plowed for crops were cemeteries because, obviously, there’s a very big cultural impediment to doing so.

There was the story about those old oak trees, right, that you were talking about?

Yeah, that’s right.

Either way, I really dug that. I’ll link that one up, too, because that was a superb piece. You had some stats in here just about Iowa that I did not know. They were breathtaking just because of what Iowa is now. I think 65 percent of the land is private monocultures of corn and soybeans. The crazy thing was that there’s so little public land in the state — 60 percent of it is just ditches on the sides of roadways.

Yeah, that totally blew my mind when I heard it. I’m from Iowa. I grew up there. I have always been surrounded by cornfields. My grandparents were farmers, so I grew up going to the farm. That’s part of why I wanted to write myself into this piece. It’s an essay because I had my own journey of realizing how transformed Iowa is. I grew up, we’d always go on vacation out west or something, we’d go see the mountains.

We know that everyone thinks of this part of the country as the flyover states. Growing up, I thought it was pretty boring too. I mean, a big reason it is largely boring is because all the interesting stuff got plowed under. And there are huge ecological and climate consequences for those choices that have been made, too.

Cemeteries, they make sense. Obviously, people don’t want to put crops on them, right? So what makes these patches different? What makes them interesting to you? I know you had a chance to actually see a few of them in the flesh. I’m just wondering how it’s different from the local landscape?

When I drove to this cemetery, Rochester Cemetery, I went past my hometown to get there. You see all the usual sites, just like cornfields, as far as you can see. Then, when you get to one of these cemetery prairies, it’s just totally like a foreign landscape from most of the rest of Iowa. You’ve got these huge, huge oak trees, just all of these grasses and flowers in the breeze. You’re imagining the little house on the prairie landscape with all these native plants.

I’m no botanist, so there are more species in this little patch than I could ever name. And also more than I see in my daily life. It’s just a strange environment to be in when you imagine that multiplied across Iowa and Illinois and the surrounding states. It all looked like that just a couple of hundred years ago.

In the cemetery that you went to, there’s this flower called the blooming shooting star. And you’ve remarked that on the right day, there’s a possibility that there’s more blooming shooting stars in this one cemetery than there are in the entire state, despite it once being the native flora.

Yeah, I heard that from a couple of scientists. This one cemetery is actually fairly widely known for these flowers. People will come from surrounding towns to experience them in the spring. I got a tip from some scientists to wait until a little later in the spring when I was intending to go do this reporting, so I could see the shooting stars.

They’re really beautiful flowers. And they have an important ecological role too, because they’ve co-evolved with bumblebees to be pollinated by them. They’re one of the first flowers that come up in the spring when the queen bumblebees are flying out to establish new colonies, and they are really critical food sources. So yeah, just really interesting, complicated relationships between all sorts of species.

Yeah, there were a few really interesting efforts that you highlighted. There’s a lot of really interesting plantings being done by folks. There are a lot of groups that are interested in these, whether they’re trying to discover new prairie cemeteries or remains of prairies. Then folks who are trying to take what remains of them (like the seeds) and spread them along the roadways and whatnot. So it just seems like there are people who are interested in this.

Yeah, absolutely. These prairie remnants are interesting as historical artifacts and biodiversity hotspots, but there’s been an understanding in Iowa for a few decades now that the benefits of prairie plants are pretty important. They prevent erosion because they’ve got these really deep roots, and they provide habitat for native species and species that we’re concerned about nationally, like monarch butterflies.

But if you want to restore prairie at a scale that matters, it’s really hard to do that in Iowa.

As you pointed out with that amazing statistic, there’s basically no public land on which to do that other than the ditches along highways. When I was trying to connect what these prairie cemeteries mean for the future, they are pretty much the only place to go if you want to restore prairie. You need the raw materials, the seeds, to do that.

These folks at the Tallgrass Prairie Center have gone all over the state for years collecting seeds, learning how to germinate and mass-produce more seeds from them. There’s no book on how to do that. They have to figure out how to grow a Shooting Star in a test plot at a university, and then they turn those seeds over to the bigger native seed production companies to produce the seeds that then get used in these ditches. It’s still a tiny fraction of the landscape, but it’s something. It’s an attempt at restoring something that was lost.

Again, this is just full of fascinating nuggets. I highly hope that people give a chance to read the whole thing, but there’s an interesting bit in there: for a while, the prairie blazing star was only available to be purchased from the Netherlands.

Yeah, isn’t that crazy? If you’re buying seeds from the Netherlands, you don’t have the genetic basis for specific places in Iowa and soil types. It just doesn’t work. It’s part of the whole extraction of this landscape. We came in, we plowed it, we found the things that we liked and could grow as flowers, there were export of those things. When you’re trying to piece this back together, you’re starting over completely.

Wild. Really, really love the story. Definitely encourage folks to check it out. There are some pictures in here that are truly nuts, even just the subsidence that you can observe sometimes. It’s wild to look at how much farmed and tilled and industrially used land has straight up sunk in Iowa compared to some of these other places.

A couple of scientists that I spoke to had that anecdote. There are places where you can see just how much erosion has happened when you’re plowing fields every single year, over and over again. All this soil is just washing away, and the prairie plants hold it together. So yeah, there are places where if you’ve got a prairie remnant right next to a cornfield, you can see feet of soil that’s been lost from the field.

Anyway, amazing story. Thanks so much for coming on. Christian, where can folks find you, and where can they find your work?

They can find all my work on my personal website. It’s christianelliott.me. I have also been trying to use BlueSky with the same username. That’s the social media I’ve been on. But yeah, thanks for featuring this story. It was really important to me to get it out there. I’m glad to have people connect with Iowa and with a landscape you don’t hear about too much.

I’m so glad you wrote it. I love every story that I put in the newsletter, but this one I’ve been telling friends about. You have to see some of this stuff.