Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac about the disappearance of one prairie plant
Every July, I watch eagerly a certain country graveyard that I pass in driving to and
from my farm. It is the time for a prairie birthday, and in one corner of this graveyard
lives a surviving celebrant of that once important event.
It is an ordinary graveyard, bordered by the usual spruces, and studded with pink
granite or white marble headstones, each with the usual Sunday bouquet of red or pink
geraniums. It is extra-ordinary 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 scythe or mower, this yard-square relic of original Wisconsin
gives birth, each July, to a man-high stalk of compass plant or cutleaf Silphium 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 country. 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!