Until last fall, when PBS screened “The American Buffalo,” a documentary by Ken Burns, I had no idea bison were native to Middle Tennessee, where I have lived for 37 years. I just assumed that Nashville was part of the great temperate deciduous forests that once covered much of the eastern half of the United States.
I should’ve guessed that the picture was more complicated. When I went looking for the once-endangered Tennessee coneflower in 2019, I found them in a rocky glade surrounded by grasslands blooming with wildflowers. And if there are grasslands here now, surely there must have been grasslands here in the past.
Before the European settlers arrived in North America, the region we know today as the American South was home to seven to 10 million acres of prairie, according to Dwayne Estes, a botanist, professor of biology at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tenn., and executive director of the Southeastern Grasslands Institute, which works to research, preserve and restore native grasslands across the South. Today nearly all those Southern prairies — along with nearly all the other types of Southern grassland ecosystems, and nearly all the plants and animals they supported — are gone.
The scope of this loss of is enormous. Until the early 18th century, the South had up to 120 million acres of grasslands — prairies, savannas, wet meadows, barrens, glades, fens, marshes, coastal dunes, balds and riverscour that collectively supported a truly breathtaking array of plants and animals. In a study published in 2021, a team of scientists including Dr. Estes identified 118 major types of grassland ecosystems in the South. Some are close to extinction.
The most widespread were the savannas, grasslands characterized by scattered trees and a wildflower-rich soil. Historically, what kept young trees from filling the grasslands and turning them into dense, closed-canopy forests were two things: fire and bison (or both). “If you take fire and bison off savanna grasslands, which we did for the first time in world history, they will naturally grow up into trees,” Dr. Estes said in an interview. “They will become what we call artificial forests.” By the end of the 19th century, both bison and fire had been largely eliminated from the Southern landscape.
We know the European settlers chopped down much of the Eastern hardwood forests to harvest timber, but the ecological devastation wrought by a belief in Manifest Destiny didn’t stop with deforestation. The grasslands began to disappear, too, as trappers and settlers slaughtered the bison and suppressed the fire and turned the rich soil into farms.
Between row-crop agriculture, urban sprawl, and the transformation of open woodlands into closed-canopy forests, among other human encroachments, there is almost nothing left of the original grassland ecosystems that once sustained the immense biodiversity of the American South, from tiny insects to grasslands birds to the great buffalo itself. The grassy places we still have — pastures, public parks, highway medians and the like — don’t serve the same ecological function that our native grasslands did. These days, “grass” means species imported from Europe and Asia, monocultures that don’t support diverse plant species or native wildlife.
Today, according to calculations by the Southeastern Grasslands Institute, less than 5 percent of our original grasslands still exist. “Yet the remaining scraps include more grassland plants and animals than the Great Plains and Midwest combined,” notes Janet Marinelli in the publication Yale Environment 360. Preserving these remnants is vital, and not just for the biodiversity they sustain. Grassland remnants tell ecologists what a nearby grasslands-restoration project should look like, and they can serve as seed stock for propagation fields that will in turn provide the seeds needed to return the landscape to itself.
If you know what you’re looking for, even a multi-generation cattle farm or 100-year-old closed-canopy forest will offer clues to its origins as a grassland, and grassland ecologists are skilled at uncovering them. In addition to working to identify and protect the original grasslands that remain, scientists at the Southeastern Grasslands Institute work with government and private landowners across the region to reestablish grasslands in the places where they originally grew.
With soils degraded by generations of row-crop agriculture, that generally means removing nonnative and invasive species and then figuring out the exact seed mix that’s appropriate for a site based on its location, topography, light and soil conditions, and the role it played in the historic landscape. Working with Roundstone Native Seed in Kentucky, and others, teams from the institute plant a mix — sometimes two or three mixes — tailored for each site, and then monitor the results.
But sometimes restoring a grassland ecosystem simply means setting things up for the landscape to restore itself: thinning trees, burning the understory, and watching as the soil awakens. “What’s really remarkable, as a botanist, is to be able to go into these places and see the seed banks and the living rootstock banks reawakened for the first time in three quarters of a century,” Dr. Estes said. “Somehow, miraculously, dozens of species of wildflowers and grasses are able to persist underneath a heavy leaf litter blanket for decades and decades.”
In addition to the Southeastern Grasslands Institute, other organizations working to preserve the grasslands of the South include the Center for Native Grasslands Management at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, the Native Habitat Project in Alabama (widely recognized, even outside the field, thanks to Kyle Lybarger’s wonderful social media posts), Quail Forever, and the National Park Service, among others. Because of their work, it’s not entirely impossible for me to imagine the vanished landscape that was once the American South.
I recently went looking for the grasslands restoration projects newly established at Radnor Lake State Natural Area and Warner Parks, both in Nashville. With the spring wildflowers already bloomed out and the fall wildflowers still setting buds, July is not the ideal time to visit a grassland restoration site, but I was thinking about the buffalo — that magnificent creature we nearly drove into extinction but saved at the last minute — and I wanted to see some of the many restoration projects that are springing up here as awareness of what this landscape is meant to look like continues to grow.
Over at Warner Parks, the bee balm was still in bloom, the frostweed was just beginning to open, and the common milkweed was dense with seedpods. Carpenter bees were filling their saddlebags with the pollen from passionflowers, and purple martins were swooping over the insect-bedazzled field. At Radnor, the restoration site was blooming with brown-eyed Susans, daisy fleabane, spiderwort and native morning glories, and the frostweed and goldenrod and ironweed were setting buds. In another month it will be glorious there.
I have entered forest clearings where fallen trees opened up tiny blooming meadows like something out of a storybook. I have stood on beach boardwalks surrounded by sandy hills of waving grasses. I have walked woodland paths surrounded by a carpet of Virginia bluebells. There is just enough left of the grasslands’ former glory here to make a longing for them feel like a longing for truth. Not a fantasy at all.
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