When a great character doesn't make the cut
Plus, a Q&A with University of Iowa biologist Erin Irish
On a warm day last May, I found myself stumbling through dense undergrowth in rural eastern Iowa, near my hometown. My headphone and microphone cords tangled in brush honeysuckle and multiflora rose as I followed a decisive path cut by Erin Irish, a biology professor at the University of Iowa, and Gene Szymkowiak, her husband, just ahead. Then we broke through into a clearing. From the hilltop, you could see for miles. The ground all around us was blackened by a prescribed burn the duo had conducted recently. Small bones and the white shells of cooked snails crunched underfoot. Little green tufts were already breaking through, reaching for the sky.
For the past 20 years, Irish and Szymkowiak have spent much of their free time on this property, sandwiched between degraded forested pasture land, trying to coax it back to an earlier state—oak savanna. The place where tallgrass prairie and woodland meet
I’d first spoken with Irish in March of last year, just after I’d gotten the assignment to write an essay about prairie remnants on pioneer cemeteries in Iowa for Noema Magazine. I’d gotten the idea for the story from another scientist at the University of Iowa, Silvia Secchi, when I interviewed her that January for an op-ed about carbon sequestration pipelines for ethanol plants in Illinois. At one point in the interview, she pulled out a book called Life and Death on the Prairie by Stephen Longmire, a New York-based landscape photographer, to illustrate a point—prairie used to cover most of the Midwest, and now it’s so rare it only persists in the few places that haven’t ever been plowed, like pioneer cemeteries. I found the book (it’s no longer in print but the University of Iowa has copies) and knew I had to visit the magical place at its center, Rochester Cemetery—a unique oak savanna remnant just 20 minutes or so from my hometown. That led to the Noema essay, and to Irish.
In the book, Longmire mentions Diana Horton, a University of Iowa professor who spent her career documenting Rochester Cemetery’s rare prairie plants. But she’d passed away, years before. I cold emailed Irish in the biology department to see if she knew much about Rochester, and it turns out she did—she used the cemetery as a model for this restoration she was attempting just a couple of miles down the road. So after I visited Rochester for a garlic mustard pull earlier that day in May, I drove down to meet Irish and Szymkowiak at their property. By that point, I was also working on a feature for bioGraphic Magazine about herbicide drift—this ongoing ecological crisis in the Midwest where chemicals sprayed on crop fields are drifting onto native ecosystems, killing even the strongest trees. It turned out drift from nearby farms was also decimating the oaks in their restored oak savanna.
So, it turned out Irish was at the center of two stories I was working on. And that ended up being a challenge—I wasn’t sure which story to use her in. She was a little outside the scope, geographically, of the bioGraphic story—it was focused on Illinois. And while the Noema story did get into prairie restoration, I already had a bunch of other sources on that topic (there were 20+ people I interviewed at length for the piece, in the end). And it didn’t make sense to introduce a whole new location/write a new scene to include her restoration.
So, Irish ended up not making the cut in either story, which was a shame because I really like her as a character. She’s complicated, like all the most interesting people are. On the one hand, she cares deeply about prairies and about ecological restoration. She’s spent so many hours and weekends and so much of her own money on the backbreaking work of seeding, conducting burns, etc. to conjure prairie from degraded land. But on the other, she makes her living, as most biologists do at the big land grant universities here in the Midwest, making industrial agriculture more efficient.
She studies corn—the very plant (invasive in Iowa, technically, although we don’t use that word because we’ve decided we want it here) that’s supplanted and destroyed native prairie across the state. It’s the reason for the century of large-scale plowing that’s left a fraction of a percent of Iowa’s native prairie extent alive, that’s polluting Iowa’s waterways, resulting in highest-in-the-nation cancer rates. And on top of that, it’s the plant that demands the herbicide application for weed control that’s now also destroying Irish’s restored prairie through drift damage. To me, it’s almost like she’s paying penance for this career spent on corn, making amends with the land for the damage industrial farming has done. Laura Jackson, the Tallgrass Prairie Center director at the University of Northern Iowa, told me that’s not uncommon—a lot of the farmers and landowners who reach out to her to try out conservation practices do so out of a sense of guilt—understanding the environmental damage farming has wrought (like fish kills down the Mississippi in the Gulf).
Maybe that internal conflict is enough of a story to stand on its own? If you want me to write it (or produce it for radio), let me know, lol. But for now, I thought I’d share my original interview with Erin, in Q&A form. I started by asking her about the late Diana Horton.
ERIN IRISH: Diana Horton was actually a person who studied mosses, but she was, in general, very passionate about preserving the natural environment. And Rochester Cemetery was close by. It’s like, less than a half hour drive from campus, right? And it was a place that’s been maintained by trustees of the cemetery for a long time, and they mow it, but the township around Rochester is very tiny, so there’s not huge amounts of resources to be pouring into that. You could think of it as benign neglect. So Diana had had with various students, gone through and made a list of everything that was out there, and so that that was a really nice resource.
Now, the reason that I am interested in this is that, although my research is on plant development, I am also very concerned about the environment and more than maybe 24 years ago, my husband and I purchased an old pasture that is oak savanna, and we’ve been in the process of restoring it. So the oaks were there, but everything else was pasture. You know, forage, non-native introduced plants, and it turns out that that the land we bought is about four miles south of Rochester Cemetery, so a good place to go and sort of see what it’s supposed to look like, and figure out if we have anything out there that’s native. It’s just been a wonderful shining star of what we’re trying to emulate, because it Rochester is also a savanna with these marvelous open grown oaks with their sort of mushroom shaped canopies that tell you that the oak grew up in full sun and not in a part of a woodland. So the cemetery existed as a source of inspiration.
Iowa is blessed with probably the best soil on Earth, so there’s hardly a square inch that wasn’t converted to row crop production. And so, the places that escaped that that move into productivity would be railroad right of ways and cemeteries, where the native plants that were there have a chance to survive.
CHRISTIAN ELLIOTT: I would actually love to hear a bit about your research background, which is plant development, right?
IRISH: I’m in this uncomfortable space in that my research organism is corn. Which there’s way too much of in this state. I guess there are other people I know who work on an organism that is an invasive species and they would prefer that it not be so successful. Corn is only invasive in terms of the infrastructure that has developed over the last century of making corn be so easy and profitable to grow that anybody with the need and interest to do agriculture as their home economy, it’s like, that’s your go-to plant. So that’s why we see so much of it. I wish there was a little bit less.
ELLIOTT: I’m so interested in that, because I’ve spoken to other researchers, and a lot of people work on corn and the land grant universities obviously have been phenomenal at understanding corn, helping us grow corn. But I understand it is kind of in direct conflict with prairie, right? And the existence of prairie?
IRISH: Yes. So, my current research topic is to understand how the plant makes the transition from juvenile to adult. So, the transition from vegetative to reproductive growth, when the plant’s making leaves, and then it starts making flowers. That’s a really easily observed and intensively studied process, but in order to make that transition to flowering, plants have to mature to what we call an adult state, and that transition is, in most species, more or less invisible. But corn is a plant where you can definitely tell the difference between a juvenile plant and adult plant, because the juvenile leaves are smaller, they’ve got a waxy surface, they look kind of blue green, and then as an adult, they quit making that wax, and so they’re bright green, and there’s hairs all over the leaves, which are also way, way bigger. So having that ability to just look at a leaf and conclude it’s still a juvenile. So it makes it good for doing experiments.
ELLIOTT: Obviously you’re a plant scientist, you like plants…
IRISH: [Laughs]
ELLIOTT: Were you always interested in prairies? Was there a moment you got interested in them?
IRISH: I can remember in college and when I was taking a course on plant identification, and the professor would say, “Oh, and this, this plant is a native,” and I’d be sort of shrugging my shoulders, like, who cares whether or not native. I grew up in Ohio where, yes, there’s agriculture. And Lake Erie is still plenty polluted from runoff from agricultural fields, although they’re way smaller than they are in Iowa. But when you come here, it’s like, “Oh my gosh.” Like, just over spring break, I drove back home to see my mom and I was just struck by how you go down the highway and you can be going through a woodland, and now I’ve, I guess, become so much of an Iowan that it’s like, “People are walking away from money that they could earn by chopping those trees down and growing corn from it.” I’m glad they didn’t, but, but it’s just striking how modified our landscape is. So it was moving here and realizing there’s something like, half of public land is just road right of ways.
ELLIOTT: Yeah, I’ve heard that stat.
IRISH: Like, parks? No, we don’t do parks. We’re gonna grow corn. And so, realizing what an ecological disaster the state is. When we moved here more than 30 years ago, I wanted a house with a big yard, because I’m plant biologist, I wanted to have a nice garden. We wound up buying a house close to campus with a pretty small yard. And so, there was this unmet need to grow stuff. So I was always looking to buy land somewhere, but didn’t really have a clear idea of what we were going to do with it besides, it was going to have plants on it, which is kind of unavoidable, unless you really want to do a parking lot. But it wasn’t until we actually got the opportunity. And then it was like, “OK, well, what are we going to do with it? Are we going to build on it or what?” And then at that point, I also had been a member of the advisory board for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. The way that worked was that there were two representatives from the three regents’ universities in Iowa, and then someone from the Farm Bureau and some Practical Farmers of Iowa, and there were some soil conservation district members. So, I started to see agriculture more from the inside than I ever did before. And then it was like, “Oh my gosh, I have an opportunity.” It seems like restoring this to something of what it was like before European settlement changed it so dramatically would be a good project.
ELLIOTT: What’s that involved? I assume a lot of work.
IRISH: Well, yeah, a lot of work. I had to learn what the plants were that are native. And so visiting Rochester Cemetery was great, because you could see what it looked like. You have field guides and there are pictures and drawings, and they are nothing like having the real thing in front of you. And then, sort of driving around level B roads, those ones that are not maintained, so, after a lot of rain, those are pretty dangerous to drive down, because you can get stuck, but looking for a little remnants where there might be some native plants, where you can collect a handful of seeds and take them home, and then figure out where they’re supposed to grow, and then do something to get them going, which for ours, we have 40 acres. We don’t have a tractor, I don’t want a tractor, I don’t want to maintain it, I don’t want to know anything about it. So our general strategy, now that we sort of have things under control, and almost all of it is converted to 95% native plants, that has been accomplished by doing burns, mostly in the spring. We do a third of it every year, so we’re on a three-year rotation. Spring burns will help us get the non-native plants that are not so adapted to a fire regime to not do so well, and that gives the natives that are adapted a chance to get a foothold. And we’ve gone and have collected some seeds from here and there, trying to stay within our part of the state, so that whoever we collect is already pre-adapted to the environment we’re going to put them in.
But just taking cattle off of it, and, you know, sort of dealing with that, the first flush of, oh my god, the weeds that came up when there were no longer cattle chomping on them was, it was astonishing. But we’re kind of past that, that horror state. And now, there are things like orchids and lilies that show up. And we did not put those seeds there. To this day, it remains a puzzle. Where did they come from? And someone would say, “Well, they probably came from a seed from nearby.” There is no seed nearby. Even though Rochester Cemetery is not that many miles away from us. It’s on the other side of the Cedar River, and it is east of us. So the chance of a lily seed making it from the cemetery to our land is, you know, there’s no way that that explains that we’re still finding them just popping up all over the place. And these are fancy. This is not day lilies, not ditch weeds. These are real Lilium species that are showing up. They’ve been there all along. How they have stayed alive in the face of 100 years of grazing and, you know, not ever gotten big enough. I mean, I feel like I have literally crawled on my hands and knees over 90% of that land pulling weeds one or another species over time. So I kind of know where everybody is. And during that time, I never saw a clump of leaves there where I’d say, “Hmm, I wonder if that’s a lily.” It’s like, no, there’s no sign of it. And there it is in its brilliant glory.
ELLIOTT: I remember reading some stuff by Stephen Packard, who did all the prairie restorations in the Chicago area, and he had this idea of, like, the land remembers what it is like to be prairie. Like, if you, if you burn it and do the right things, all the seed bank in it can come back up.
IRISH: Yeah, it’s pretty impressive.
ELLIOTT: You sort of said this already, but how long have you been working on the prairie again?
IRISH: We bought it in 2002. So more than 20 years. We’ve been working on it since the first day we bought it, working hard on it. There’s no set of directions you can refer to, so we did a lot of stuff that they gave us zero results. So, I would say we have had 20 years of successful practices. And I’m not saying that nobody has ever done this before, but a lot of reconstruction and restorations are being done, if it’s on a large scale. It was a former agricultural plot, and the people who are doing that often have access to things like tractors. The idea that, you sow the seeds and then you mow three or four times during the first summer to keep the weeds that would have come up around it down. Well, I don’t have that. So we tried a weed whacker, you know that thing with the little string. And so if you’re thinking about a scale of more than an acre, it’s like, no.
ELLIOTT: I wanted to ask you too about oak savanna, because, as I understand it, that’s even more, I guess even a rarer, to some extent, ecosystem.
IRISH: So, if you think about a woodland like you find in Ohio and a grassland, at the point where they come together, it’s sort of an interdigitated thing. The difference between woodland and grassland is basically number of inches of precipitation per year, and the slightly drier environment is more favorable for fires, and so the fires tend to keep the trees down in prairies, whereas it’s just wet enough that you don’t have the big forest fires that would convert an Eastern hardwood forest into a grassland. The biome of eastern hardwood forest grades into the tallgrass prairie of the Upper Midwest, and it’s because of precipitation. And so it’s at that point where you’re going from wet enough for trees to too dry for trees. At that boundary is where savanna develops, where there are tree species that are fire tolerant, and they are mostly fire tolerant because they have really thick bark as adults. As seedlings, if a fire goes past your oak tree, and it’s only this big [she gestures with fingers] it’s gonna get burned down to the ground, but the roots survive, unless you’ve had a catastrophic fire. And then eventually, it’s a long enough time happens between successive fires that that it’s now big enough that when a fire goes through it survives.
In our savanna, we have giant old oaks, but they are so old that because of herbicide drift and probably other environmental assaults, they are one by one dying. We knew that they were big old trees and that were not going to last forever. We had no idea how many more years they would be alive, relative to how long we’re going to be alive. So, one of the first things we were doing was looking for new oaks that would come in and start to grow to ultimately fill in for where the big ones were eventually going to perish. And so, when we do our spring burns, we rake like crazy, make 12-foot circles around them. Basically rip off all of the grass that was dried up and dead and therefore burnable around them.
ELLIOTT: You brought up herbicide drift, and it’s interesting, I’m working on a different story about that, more focused on Illinois. But it sounds like that’s a big issue that I’m hearing is like, we want to keep these oak savannas, but the oaks are not doing so well. So, it sounds like that’s also happening in Iowa.
IRISH: Since I’m plant biologist, this is actually something where I feel like I can speak with more authority. There’s this phenomenon called tatters, where oak leaves, they’ll come out in the spring, and they look like they’ve been chewed by insects all the way down to all the veins. So there’s just like the skeleton of the leaf is left. And for a long time, people thought, oh, you know, bad bug infestation. And it wouldn’t happen every year, but it’s definitely associated with a combination of two different kinds of herbicides, auxin-based one so things like 2-4,d, and then another one, Metolachlor.
ELLIOTT: I was talking to the Prairie Rivers Network, a nonprofit out of Champaign. But they’re mainly looking at Dicamba.
IRISH: Yes, that one’s really bad. So Dicamba because it’s so volatile, the legal practice of application of herbicide is that you have to be mindful of wind speed, and so under 10 miles per hour, it’s okay to spray. And the idea is that you apply it, and then the mist settles to the ground, and then the particles adhere to the plants, and it does its job. But Dicamba is really, really volatile, so you can spray it doesn’t just stay where it is. It will re-volatilize and then go in an uncontrolled fashion to lots of things. We’ve had Dicamba completely destroy a vegetable garden, completely wiped out, but it also affects oak trees. But Metolachlor and 2-4,d, this is still somewhat up for debate, but those herbicides have the effect of interfering with the biosynthesis of the long-chain fatty acids that are the precursors to the wax that’s on the surface of oak leaves. And so, it’s this window of time when the leaves are expanding and are maybe a centimeter along, when they are cranking out those waxes that are going to wind up protecting the surface. And so, when that herbicide hits at that point, it would have the effect of preventing the formation of that protective wax cover. And that would explain why the leaves look like they’ve just been eaten up by insects. They basically have fried out because they don’t have the waxes that keep the water in the leaf.
ELLIOTT: So this is that’s not something they have to test before they’re when they’re developing an herbicide?
IRISH: The testing is basically to make the product attractive to the purchaser. It is not so much thinking about the neighbor of the purchaser. So that there can be collateral damage is usually not a super concern.
ELLIOTT: I’m so glad I talked to you, because it seems like you can help me with both of these stories.
It turns out, of course, that she did. Returning to the tape of this interview, and an hour and a half of recording from my visit to her property, Irish was invaluable in helping me think through these two stories. She just didn’t end up quoted in either of them. Sometimes, that’s how it goes!