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Conservancy goes wild

Rosa Salter Rodriguez

The Journal Gazette

When members of the Indiana Garden Club recently contributed about $11,000 to The Nature Conservancy toward the purchase of 200 acres in Newton County in northwestern Indiana, the donation highlighted one of the state’s most unusual land conservation programs.

It also highlighted more than 30 years of commitment to preserving the natural environment by members of the state’s gardening community. The Indiana Garden Club is the umbrella group for local garden clubs statewide, including two clubs in Fort Wayne and one in Auburn.

Ann Berge of Crown Pointe, land trust chairwoman, says the club has made annual donations to the conservancy since 1975-76.

The donations began with $11,000 to preserve a naturally significant hemlock grove in Jackson County, Berge says. Since then, about $93,000 has been contributed to help acquire or improve 900 acres, including Fawn River Fens in LaGrange County and Chapman Lake Wetlands in Kosciusko County, according to the conservancy.

The latest donation will also assist the Kankakee Sands Seed Nursery, a conservancy program helping to restore more than 7,500 acres to wetland and prairie.

The conservancy’s property in Morocco includes what Chip Sutton, conservancy spokesman, calls “a giant seed farm” where staff members and volunteers every year collect, clean and package seed from native plants so it can be sown in areas targeted for restoration.

Kankakee Sands is believed to be the largest prairie restoration project in Indiana and one of the largest in the nation, Sutton says. The native-plant nursery may be the largest of its kind in non-profit hands, he says.

“It blows my mind how they can deal with all this seed, some of which is as fine as talc,” he says.

But Alyssa Nyberg, a botanist who serves as nursery manager, calls the process of seed-saving fun.

“We have about 120 acres set aside for growing native wildflowers and grasses for seed production,” she says, noting the last of the annual collecting, of a species known as Riddell’s goldenrod, was being done last week.

“We have about 150 different kinds of plants, and we generate every year about 1,500 pounds of clean seed, and believe it or not, that is not enough,” she says. “So we have to collect wild seed as well.”

That collection, on land owned by the state and federal government and private landowners, typically yields an additional thousand pounds of seed. The gatherers limit themselves to land close to the acreage being restored to ensure species are truly native.

Gatherers start their task in April and harvest whenever a specific plant is at its ripest, Nyberg explains.

“We use a variety of methods. Some we simply slip off with our fingertips and put into a paper sack with the date, place and who picked it. Some we use a scissors or a hand sickle, and if it’s a really large bed at the nursery, we use a combine.”

Plant material is dried for several weeks in a barn and the seed is separated from the plants’ chaff, which is saved and put back on the fields in case some seed remains.

“One of our staff members jokes that it’s ‘no seed left behind,’ ” Nyberg says.

But when the seed gatherers work on non-nursery land, they do leave behind at least one third of the seeds for food for wildlife and natural reseeding, Nyberg notes.

The process has allowed the conservancy to restore about 5,300 acres since its first Kankakee Sands acquisition of 7,200 acres in 1995-96. In the year that ended June 30, 350 additional acres were restored, Sutton says.

The acquisition aided by the garden club, and another in the last year, “allowed us to close up gaps” in area acreage that had remained in farming, Sutton says. “So it’s now one contiguous ownership by The Nature Conservancy,” he says.

That’s important for fostering wildlife, which requires uninterrupted habitat, he says, adding that wildlife has returned to the area in a big way. The preserve’s acreage includes Conrad Savanna, Beaver Lake Prairie and Willow Slough Fish and Wildlife Area in Indiana. There is additional preserved acreage across the state line in Illinois.

“In fact, Kankakee Sands is quickly becoming a mecca for birders because birds are really thriving on the restoration activity, and that applies to other creatures as well. Reptiles and amphibian species are responding very favorably to our restoration work,” Sutton says.

Hiking trails on the property were opened to visitors last month and will remain open all winter. There are also workdays when the public can help at the nursery.

The next ones will be in the spring. Workdays will be from 8 to 11 a.m., Fort Wayne time, on March 14 and 28 and will involve transplanting seedlings in the preserve’s greenhouse.

There is also an organization, Friends of Kankakee Sands, which provides volunteers and raises funds for projects.

Nyberg says only a limited amount of seed is made available to the public but that may increase as more prairie gets established.

Altogether, nearly 400 species have been used in the restoration. Some of the plants growing there include foxglove, lupines, blue-stem grass, sandweed grass, flowering spurge and prickly pear cactus, “which is kind of fun, because you don’t think of it as growing in Indiana,” Nyberg says.

She says among some of the species growing at the preserve and considered relatively rare in Indiana are Michigan lily, with its showy orange and black-spotted turned-back petals, and Sullivant’s milkweed, with flowerets that look like angels.

Berge, an avid native-plant gardener, says the garden club’s involvement shows the ability of members to think beyond their own garden walls. In a time when undeveloped habitats are dwindling and with them the region’s biodiversity, preservation and restoration projects are needed, she says.

“This is a gigantic project,” she says. “They do a lot of experimentation there and are developing knowledge so that people will be able to go there and see this and bring it back. The way that they have been able to even partially bring it back to the way it was before people moved in and started using the land is gigantic. It’s a big step.”

rsalter@jg.net

Features

Courtesy photos

Staff members and volunteers at The Nature Conservancy’s Kankakee Sands Nature Preserve near Morocco collect seeds.

Volunteers use cloths to trap some seeds. The program, which uses the seeds in restoring more than 7,500 acres to their original prairie state, recently received a donation from the Indiana Garden Club.

Garden