I've got something that resembles this in my yard and tried like the devil
to get rid of it!
From: "Alloway" <ralloway(a)earthlink.net>
Reply-To: INPCRP-L(a)rootsweb.com
To: INPCRP-L(a)rootsweb.com
Subject: [INPCRP] JULY - a prairie birthday
Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2003 15:21:22 -0500
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!
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If we cannot respect the dead, how can we respect the living?
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