Prairies Past
I love this time of year, when we see a little more diversity in our roadside wildflowers, at least those that can survive herbicide spraying regimes and the mowing mania that has swept America in the last 50 years. In those few untouched spots, shelves of grass up on an unreachable ledge or hard-to-get to spots along the roadside, we see wildflowers that are more generally associated with grassland habitats than the forest plants and habitats that dominate much of the Arkansas Ozarks.
These specialized habitats, now rare in Northwest Arkansas are remnants of vast grasslands that covered as much as 2 million acres of the state when the westward migration of European settlers arrived in the early 1800s. The Great Plains and much of the Upper Midwest covered in tallgrass prairie, with deep rich soils, are where we picture large herds of buffalo thundering across the landscape.
However, areas east and south of the main expanses of the Great Plains harbored pockets of open habitat grasslands dominated by species associated with the Great Plains such as big bluestem (Angropogon gerardii). The plants that grow in these habitats are primarily drought tolerant, and with limited soil moisture, they tended to burn every two to three years, helping to enrich nutrients and limit woody plants to drought-tolerant shrubs, with only a smattering of trees.
Today we can see these prairie remnants at several Arkansas Natural Heritage properties and other conservation areas within an hour’s drive. Baker Prairie Natural Area located close to downtown Harrison is the largest Ozark Mountain prairie, with only 30 acres left of what was once a 5,000-acre tallgrass prairie. Not far to the west on the corner of U.S. 62 and Dixieland Drive in Rogers is the unique prairie remnant, Searles Prairie Natural Area. This is a mere 12.5-acre remnant of a 10,000-acre prairie that covered parts of the Springfield Plateau in Northwest Arkansas. South of Fort Smith in Franklin County is the 584-acre Cherokee prairie, one of the most extensive tracts of tallgrass prairie still left in Arkansas.
Our glades, outcrops with thin soil and few trees (except encroaching red cedar in the absence of fire) is where we find many prairie species such as Echinacea pallida, pale purple coneflower, and the beautiful red Indian paintbrush (Castilleja coccinea). We catch glimpses of these unique micro habitats are we drive on U.S. 62 just west of Eureka. These are snapshots of where we can enjoy what bits of habitat that survive before the arrival of European settlers. We are fortunate that some of these areas are still protected.