TRANSCRIPT
INTERVIEWEES: Mickey and Bob Burleson (MB, BB)
INTERVIEWERS: David Todd (DT)
DATE: June 19, 1999
LOCATION: Temple, Texas
TRANSCRIBERS: Robin Johnson
REEL: 2011

Note: numbers mark the time codes for the VHS tape copy of the interview. “Misc.” refers to various off-camera conversation or background noise, unrelated to the interview.

DT: We’re here in a tall grass, Blackland Prairie, East of Temple, Texas and I was curious if the Burlesons could describe why they became concerned about the fate of tall grass prairies.
02:35 – 2011
MB: It was really a natural outcome of acquiring this property. We had been touring all of Texas and interested in all of the different eco regions of the state but we really hadn’t gotten all that interested in prairie. Our first love, at the time, was the hill country and we had ranch property in the hill country. So we cared a lot about that area. And when we acquired this place, we wanted to know what had been here, what had been natural. There was a creek bottom that was wild but the rest was all cropland. So we began to ask around. We asked the SCS people. They directed us to certain books to identify species. Told us where certain remnants were in the county and we got started that way. We started—then it was a self educating project after that.
03:27 – 2011
BB: We got the—we got to the point where we would just go and find prairie remnants, tiny little pieces of them left along railroads or old cemeteries or things like that and we would just watch the plants as they came up and watch their—their growth till we could identify all the plants in all stages of their growth. And then we started collecting seed and we spent, I guess, essentially every weekend for a year, Mickey and I, hand collecting and stripping seed off all the native prairie plants of these little old remnants we found. And then we planted those in old crop land to recreate a—a tall grass prairie and we’ve had a very successful recreation here.
04:13 – 2011
MB: But we didn’t really get our grass seed that way. We harvested all the other plants that were native to the prairie. Our grass seed were har—were either given to us by the Soil Conservation Service but were primarily harvested by us with antique seed harvesters. And the first seed harvester that we used came from a neighbor whose father had been interested in native grasses and who had built his own harvester. And had a—it was just a little—kind of a trailer operation that we pulled along behind our Scout, at the time, and later behind a tractor and it had a rotating drum made out of boards and that had square nails sticking out of them. It was that old. And this drum rotated as you pulled it and it sucked in the seed and the stems and the leaves and a lot of trash with it but we would then get a box full of all this wonderful loose hay, so to speak. And Bob would toss it into a trailer until we had a trailer full. We’d drive round and around and around an existing prairie remnant in the area and we always had permission of the landowner to
05:25 – 2011
harvest and then at the end of the day, we’d have a trailer full of seed, stems, leaves, bugs, all kinds of other things. And we had to come home and quickly plant it because it was too deep, too much green stuff in it because it would heat up over night and kill the seed. So he would sit in his car with the windows shut and harvest all day and he’s very allergic to all this stuff so at night, he would drive me around while I stood up in the trailer with a pitchfork and tossed out a lot of this grass seed and all the trash that went with it which helped to mulch the seed and helped us get a good stand. We did plant the clean seed that we bought from various sources. Some of it was from sources much too far away to be really successful here even though we did get a stand, it didn’t—it wasn’t a hardy grass here because it came from the panhandle. Although it’s the same grass we find growing here, we need to—we needed we learned, to collect seed from the local species.
DT: How close is local?
06:31
MB: Oh 200 yar—miles,
BB: About 100, 150 mile radius. That’s max—that’s max.
MB: Okay, I thought it was more like 200.
MB: No, it’s—it’s further going from south to north than it is going north to south. The photo period changes and the—and the—and the grass is acclimated to certain rainfall and things like that. If you bring panhandle grass down here, it flowers in the summer and then it’s—when it’s hot and dry it just doesn’t do any good.
07:01
MB: It doesn’t seem to germ—make seeds…
(talking at same time)
BB: This is Eastern—eastern gamma grass. One of the pi—one of the grasses that the pioneers would describe as being higher than the horn of the saddle, you know. And, as you can see, I mean, I’m—I’m nearly six feet tall and the grass is a foot over my head right now and it’ll even be higher before the summer’s over.
MB: …higher in the bottom land. This is pretty much up land right here.
BB: Yeah. We have some down there in the bottom you couldn’t walk through right now. I mean, literally, you’d have to take a machete and chop your way through, like jungle, in the summertime.
07:33
MB: It’s a very dramatic grass, a beautiful grass and the seed is like a kernel of corn. See how big it is?
07:40
BB: Yeah, it’s a relative of—it’s a relative of (talking at same time) wild corn, relative of tail (?), the—the wild progenitor of corn and from Mexico.
DT: Can you talk a little bit more about the first impressions of the people that came through this prairie before it was cultivated?
07:59 – 2011
BB: They—they—there are numerous early journals that people wrote from everything from Washington Irving’s, Tour of the Prairies and things like that. There are many others that are less—less well known.
MB: And others that are strictly Texan.
BB: And others that are strictly Texas. Basically what they saw was no trees. All these trees you see right now around you are the result of fence lines and birds perching and dropping seed. In the—in the native prairie it was simply rolling hills of green and a few trees along the creek bottoms. But basically treeless almost in this part of Texas. And so you could see literally for miles of just rolling green, blue grasses waving in the breeze. And there’s hardly any sight on earth any more beautiful than that. If you ever go up into the Flint Hills of Kansas where you can see long distances of tall grass prairie, it is true beautiful.
MB: And many of the early travelers exclaimed very poetically about all the wildflowers.
BB: Oh yeah, in the spring it was just a blanket of very colored wildflowers and—and so that’s all the early journals described it like that. Trackless, you know, basically you can get lost in it. It’s—there’s nothing to find your way, no landmarks are visible and it’s just like a—a—an ocean.
09:21 – 2011
MB: And most comers came through the woods of East Texas and the Eastern U.S. and then, all of a sudden, it opened up just like the ocean opens up when you go to the beach. And so, that was the common description, a sea of grass, a sea of grass, an ocean, a prairie and it must—and, of course, with the tall grass it’s very undulating as the wind blew through it.
DT: What distinguished the Blackland Prairies from other kinds of tall grass, other kinds of prairies?
09:50 – 2011
BB: The Blackland Prairie in Texas is a strip, a narrow strip from 15 to 20 miles wide. It runs from just about where San Antonio is to the Red River. And like everything else that, you know, all the other exposures in Texas, originally it—it was an ocean beach line, so to speak, at one point in time. As the seas came and went in Texas in the cretaceous period and—and like that. But it—it is slightly different in constituents from the tall grass prairies to the north in that the plants are more attuned to a drier and warmer climate. The grasses are very similar all the way to—to the Canadian border, to the prairies of Canada but the—the—the part of Texas that’s called the Blackland Prairie, it’s—I’d say, on average, it runs from 30 inches a year of rainfall to maybe 45 up toward the Red River and—and most other prairie areas north of there get either more rain or they have a cooler year around temperature. So, you know, there are slight differences…
MB: And there are different forbs and legumes…
BB: And there are slightly different forbs and legumes. The further north you go, the more difference there is between them. That’s what it boils down to but basically it’s—it’s a part of the tall grass prairie that goes all the way from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada.
11:18 – 2011
MB: And we found it and remnants of it in Mexico in those island mountainous areas. Very few…
DT: Can you describe some of your visits down there and how you found the…
MB: Well the only place that I can speak for…
(misc.)
11:36 – 2011
MB: The—the only area that I can really speak of from experience is the Burro Mountain and we were very surprised to find remnants of good forest there and remnants of the prairie grass that was the same as what we had been seeing in the Blackland and the tall grass prairies. But they’re only in the higher elevations and probably only because that was owned by someone who just didn’t ever over-graze it and it was not ever part of an ejido and those ejidos are very over-grazed because there’s such great need among the people. They’re like agricultural communes and there are a lot of people who dependent upon making a living from those areas so they do generally over-graze them.
DT: You mentioned that most of the prairie tracts that are remaining are small and scattered. Why have they become so rare?
12:39 – 2011
MB: Because this area of the state was the most productive area and had the highest population west of the Mississippi early on bef—before the turn of the century. It attracted farmers who plowed up the prairie. It attracted people who wanted to make their living off of farmers. And the big markets developed in Dallas, Waco, Austin, San Antonio, all of them down the Blackland Prairie. The railroad ran through this area. There was a lot of development, lot of influx of population and it was just so productive that people wanted to plow up everything they could get a plow to. And most of the farmers then had some kind of livestock because they depended upon them for food themselves. And so whatever was not plowed up was grazed and over-grazed generally because it—they were small areas. Up in the northern end of the prairie there are some bigger tracts and they still remain a few larger tracts. Most of the tracts were once hay meadows. And they have been very productive over the years. They—the remaining hay meadows we are told are more productive than the surrounding (?). Modern managers say that the—year in and year out the prairie hay meadow or the hay brings them more income than the surrounding cotton land or corn land just because there needs to be such an investment nowadays in those—in the crop lands
14:11 – 2011
BB: And it doesn’t require any fertilization or any herbicides or and insecticides to make the crop so they have no input. If the rain comes they—they make money off of it.
MB: There are just not very many of them left though.
BB: Yeah. And it’s—I guess the sad thing is that there’s probably less than 1/10 of 1% of the Blackland Prairie still exists in prairie, even in—that’s counting all the little—if you push together all the little cemeteries and strips along old railroad rights-of-ways and corners left in fields and things like that…
MB: 5 acre, 10 acre…
BB: 5 acre, 10 acre hay meadows, if you push all those together you’ve got less than 1/10 of 1%. So it’s the single most endangered eco system left in Texas. And the truth is, short of certain areas in—in North Texas, there’s no way to have a prairie like the Blackland Prairie unless you remake it. And that’s why we decided to build one and this is part of it here. This is—there’s about 70 acres here and we’ve got probably another 200 hundred acres over there near our house in an earlier stage of succession. But gradually we’re—we’re bringing more and more of the farm into prairie. And it involves, like you saw, when you were at the house, you saw all those seeds we had collected this spring. We’ll plant all those in the prairie in early fall and just by scarifying the ground and stomping—stomping them in. It’s really a not very scientific.
DT: You don’t cultivate it…
BB: No, it takes care of itself.
15:41 – 2011
MB: We do sometimes in the—if we’re planting an initial planting in an area. Like if we wanted to take—well when this farm’s paid for, we’ll take this crop land more than likely out of production and put it into prairie grasses. And that’ll be the first step. And we’ll plant—we’ll plow it up and plant with a planter but then thereafter, we don’t want to disturb what we’ve already planted so we will add annually for a while new plants—new seed.
DT: Do you put some kind of seeds in the bottoms and some kind in the upland and…
BB: Yeah. Right.
16:11 – 2011
MB: This is a grass we—we prefer to put in the bottom. It does better in the bottom. I’m surprised that it’s doing so well here. I think there’s a little seep here. But it is a bottom land grass.
BB: We put it here primarily so that when people came in that didn’t want to wade through the jungle of grass in the bottom, they could at least see what Eastern Gamma looks like up close. And we—and it’s really done quite well. We just planted these from rootings.
DT: Can you tell us some other species out here?
16:37 – 2011
BB: Sure, sure we can. The (walking)…
MB: We have written an article that describes that we—the different species we’ve established here. And we have established over a 100 different prairie species which is probably the most diverse prairie replication project in the state. It’s not the biggest but it is the most diverse of—of any size.
(walking)
17:13 – 2011
BB: Now this would be switch grass. Switch grass in the bottom will be—it’ll be already over 8 feet tall. If you’re down in it, you’ll be lost. You’ll be like you—like in elephant grass in Vietnam. Okay. And it is—again, it’s a native prairie grass that the pioneers when they encountered it would say they could tie the stems together across their saddle horn on their horse. Up here on the upland, it rarely gets over about 6 feet tall. But—but in the bottom, this very same plant would be 8 to 10 feet tall by late summer.
17:51 – 2011
MB: One of the fun things that really wasn’t in the plan initially but that’s occurred because of our prairie replication is the interest locally and regionally of people who want to come and see it. And we have had many groups out here, school children, scout groups, SCS tours, academics, conservation groups and the children who come out here are so amusing in a way and they also tell us something about their generation because when they step out of their car, they will look out here and they’ll say, do we have to walk out in those weeds? But there are bugs out there, there are snakes out there, they’re stickery things and so we just tell them yes, we’re going to walk out in the weeds and they very gingerly step out into the prairie. And after about 15 minutes, especially by the time when we get to the bottom where the grass is over their heads, they are romping, jumping around, building nests in this tall grass that’s way over their heads and just having a ball. But their initial reticence is very dramatic and it’s nearly always the same. They’ve grown up in town. They’ve been on concrete or mowed lawns and this is kind of a scary, new experience for them. So…
19:13 – 2011
BB: Then we take them to the coyote dens where the coyotes raise pups every year and let them look down into the dens and—and see—see—and see the trails that the mama coyote and the papa coyote used to bring the food to the young ones. In fact, the last tour we had here, they were using—they were using the den at that very—very time and they beat—well beaten trails through the grass to the hole that they dig out.
DT: You mentioned hollows, I think it’s called pig hollows…
BB: Hog wallows, yeah, yeah.
DT: Can you explain what that is and why it’s part of a native prairie?
19:51 – 2011
BB: This land—it’s—it’s—it’s a function, not of the prairie, but a function of the land. The Blackland soil is what they call a self swallowing soil. It—in dry weather it’s got a high clay content. In dry weather, it kind of cracks and opens up. Then it—the edges fall into the hole so to speak. Then the rain comes and the holes, you know, swell together and close up. Well the gradual process of that over a period of years leaves little basins. And some of them can be a foot and a half deep and ten feet wide. After—when rain comes, it looks like you’ve got hundreds of puddles out there because each of them looks like a little basin shaped puddle but it—not all the soil we have on the place does that. This one—this particular meadow here never forms the—the gilgais, what they’re called. Right across the gravel road on the far hillside, they form immediately. We plowed that area up to—to get rid of the old non-native grass that was there, killed it off, replanted with the prairie grasses and within 4, 5 years, all the hog wallows had reformed naturally. It was just flat as a tabletop when we planted but then 4 or 5 years of summer, winter and the—the changes of plastic movement of the soil, they reformed and now we’ve got the big hog wallows all over up there.
MB: Tell them about the microenvironment they’ll find up there and how it’s different from the surrounding area.
21:24 – 2011
BB: When you have this—these vertisols, these self swallowing soils and, by the way, Africa is an area that has vertisols in it, yeah, one parts—parts of South Africa and parts of Zimbabwe where you came from have that—have that character of soil. And there’s just a few places in the world where it is. Up in the mid-west, down here in Texas, over in—in Africa and maybe one or two places in Europe that has some of it. But anyway, each little basin becomes a tiny, microhabitat of its own. Totally different grasses and forbs grow there than are growing everywhere else in the prairie.
(talking at same time)
22:09 – 2011
BB: Yeah, and they’re all adapted to that extra period of inundation after a rain when the rain just stays there a good long while and there’s more water in it—in that one little basin than there is anywhere else. And so the—the grasses and the forbs become adapted to that type environment.
DT: Mickey, could you talk about the differences between grasses and forbs
22:40 – 2011
MB: Anything that’s not a grass is a forb, my husband says but I don’t totally agree with them because there are weeds out there and weeds are just anything you don’t want. But we do want a lot of the forbs. There are wildflowers—would be included in that group if they’re not a legume and I don’t consider a legumes forbs. I consider them another major component of the prairie. The forbs in prairies are primarily perennials and they are good forage plants and that’s why they’ve disappeared. They—there are a lot of annuals that grow in prairies as they get disturbed but then they kind of crawl back to the fringes or they become less in number until there’s a big disturbance and they may increase greatly in one year’s time. But some of the forbs would include a plant we see up here, the compass plant which is yellow. We’ll see more of it later. The black sampson, another plant which is the purple cone flower and I don’t know these scientific names. Bob could tell you those but most people would be able to identify, most Texans rather by their scientific names if they’d ever seen them. Most of the forbs you find in a prairie are rare plants.
(talking at same time)
MB: They haven’t been declared rare but you don’t—but (?)…
23:57 – 2011
BB: This is—this is the tall blue sage, salvia. Pictures say salvia patchura(?) and it’s got a square stem and a very—a very aromatic leaf. If you crush it, it smells real sagey and has a good odor to it. You can make—you can make a tea out of it if you’re the kind of person who wants to give it a try. Little tubular shaped flower that the bees just love. It’s got—so they’ll flock around this blue sage when it is blooming.
24:35 – 2011
MB: The—one interesting thing about the forbs is that the spring blooming forbs and many of the forbs have dramatic blooms are lower growing because the grasses at that time of the year are low and they don’t have to compete with tall grasses. And as the season wears on, the forbs that are blooming are taller and taller. This salvia, the blue sage that Bob showed you is gen—one that generally blooms in the fall and it blooms when the Indian grass is up blooming and all the grasses are much taller and it’s much more predominant. It’s blooming a little early here this year. And in the fall you might see a lot more of it out here. It might be colorful enough to really catch your eye but the—May is a wonderful time of year on the prairie. There are lots of forbs in bloom, lots of legumes blooming and it’s just gorgeous. So if you get a chance to see a prairie, Blackland prairie in May, that’s the time to go. It’s also gorgeous in September when the grasses are blooming, they’re tall and some of them have beautiful feathery golden heads and the pretty picture sage which is this beautiful blue in contrast to the gold of the Indian grass is blooming. And the false scar(?), the white flower is in profusion at that time of year. It’s a—it’s a really beautiful time. That’s when a lot of sunflower are blooming too. The—the maximillian sunflower. The common sunflower, the yellow with the brown center is not a big component of prairie remnants. It’s more of a weedy plant and you’re not going to find a lot of it in a good prairie remnant. But you will find a maximillian which has a yellow center and it’s good forage
DT: What are the major problems with weeds in the prairie?
(walking)
26:33 – 2011
MB: There are exotics in this area brought in by European settlers. Johnson grass is one of the major ones. Some of the Bermuda grasses. They’re two big competitors of prairie grasses. Another is KR Bluestem which was brought in by the Soil Conservation Service from Africa and some of our other introduced grasses are from Africa and there are problems. But generally, the prairie grasses will out compete these introduced species because they’re just well adapted to the climate and soils. We have helped ours along, not—we didn’t want to use any kind of herbicide because that would hurt the plants we wanted, but we’ve helped our prairie along by mowing it in the springtime, two or three times a spring in early years to cut down on the amount of Johnson grass and to make it less vigorous and give light to the soil below so that our native grasses could get a good foothold and take off. And…
DT: Could you show us some exotics – Johnson grass?
27:39 – 2011
MB: I think this is probably Johnson grass right here but I don’t see any blooming. Oh here’s some across the way. Right here is a good—a good example of Johnson grass. Now see this is a disturbed area. It gets plowed every year. It gets sprayed. This is a milo field and so this is part of that field but the edges of it don’t get planted with milo and whatever comes up here is apt to be a weed and something you don’t really want.
28:06 – 2011
BB: That’s an African native grass. It was brought over in the mid 19th century as a cure-all for agricultural problems because it would grow under conditions where other grasses wouldn’t.
MB: A lot of it was brought over during the building of the railroad because I think they used the Johnson grass hay to feed the stock that was used in building the railroad.
BB: And it became such an active invader that they eventually passed laws making it illegal for an owner to allow Johnson grass to escape his property or illegal for a railroad to let it get off the railroad onto the land.
MB: Now how did they obey that law?
28:53 – 2011
BB: Oh it was a worthless law because no one could enforce it. The grass does what it wants to do. And they soon learned that no matter what they did, it was going to be with them forever. I mean, but you will—you will notice—you will notice there’s very little of it in the prairie. It only comes in after a disturbance. If we, for example, if we parked the combines that are here to harvest the milo, if we parked the combines on the prairie and beat it down and—and really set it back, the next year we’d have Johnson grass coming up. And it takes several years to—to get rid of it. As it is, it—it can hold its own because it develops a turf that is resistant to the—to the Johnson grass. Let’s go up here a little further into an area where some…
(talking at same time)
BB: Yeah, some blooms are still hanging on because we had a recent rain and I think you’ll enjoy seeing some of these plants.
(misc.)
30:09 – 11
BB: In my—in my left hand I’m holding the blooming head of white flowered prairie clover, a little legume which is very, very aromatic and which attracts bees by the thousands and is a—an excellent soil forming plant. It fixes nitrogen in the soil and benefits all the rest of the plants like all legumes do. This plant is a plant that is—that is extremely interesting in that it is found only in the true prairies. It’s called compass plant or they call it rosin week because when it’s wounded by a bird, it exudes a kind of rosinous or rosin type of juice to discourage the—the predator and the pioneer children—see here where it’s been bitten by a bug—see that little globe, that little clear globe of rosin? The pioneer children used to gather those little beads of rosin and break them off, chew them like gum.
31:18 – 2011
MB: I think they did more than one globe–glob.
BB: Oh yeah, it takes a lot to make a mouthful but—but at certain times of year, the thing exudes a whole lot more than others. There it is. It stays gummy. It stays together and it has a real nice flavor.
DT: Can you talk about other uses for native prairie plants?
31:43 – 2011
BB: There’s a—there’s a plant out here called Echinacea that is—or black sampson or prairie coneflower—where—let’s see Mickey—where…
MB: Most of it’s growing in an area sou—north of here.
BB: Yeah, it’s already dropped its leaves though, it’s already dropped its petals here.
MB: Well, we can find some.
BB: Yeah there is—there is some just a little ways back over there. Anyway, there’s drooping purple flowers and a real dark brown rounded head. And a lot of people use the root of that for a tea—an herb tea. There’s also a small bush out here called jersey tea that is pretty common in this prairie…
MB: We’ll—we’ll run across it…
32:30 – 2011
BB: We’re—we’re surely going to run across some here in a minute but it’s everywhere but the grass kind of is dominating it right now. But it—it is used as a—to steep the leaves and make a tea. The—the rosin weed or compass plant is used for just chewing gum or a substitute for chewing gum. The truth is, I don’t know—all I do know the—the Indians dug up the flowers of the wild—the roots of the wild hyacinth that grows out here. It’s called—up north they call it camas…
MB: Camacia…
BB: The scientific name is Camacia salardes but the—they call—there was a big battle over it in—remember the Chief Joseph war up in Washington State and Idaho? Well they were fighting over the Indians’ right to the camas field where they dig these bulbs is basically the same plant as we have down here in these prairies. It’s a round black bulb, it’s about six inches below the surface of the ground. And you—and you have to dig it up with a digging stick if you’re—if you’re an Indian. And—but they’re edible. Once you peel off the black onion-like outer covering, it’s pure white and—and, you know, interesting taste. I—I don’t—I think I’d call it survival food but…
MB: How about turnip root?
33:51 – 2011
BB: Turnip root is edible. Yeah, it’s a—it’s an—a member of the—it’s a legume and—of the sceralia(?) family and we have it out here in the meadow. And—but—but I must admit, we’re—we’re not big experimenters on—on the useful, edible properties or medicinal properties of prairie plants. We look at them more as a community.
MB: But I’m—I’m always very interested in that…
BB: She wants to eat—she’ll try a little of anything. That’s right.
34:22 – 2011
MB: I see a big blue stem a bloom which is unusual this time of year. And that is a—tell us about that grass Bob because it was the dominant grass of the…
34:33 – 2011
BB: Big Blue stem which usually blooms in September is right now blooming in this prairie and I’m not sure why. It may be because we had such a drought last year that it got out of its cycle. It’s got—they call it turkey foot because it has the three seed heads. These are, right now, in flower so you can see the little individual florets. People don’t think of grasses as blooming like wildflowers but they bloom. They’re a blooming, flowering plant just like any other of the flowering plants. And this grass normally in the fall will be about 7 feet tall. It’s going through some sort of an early cycle this year and there’s 3—3 different—4—5 different columns coming up and I’m not sure why it’s blooming early.
MB: However it was the dominant grass of the Blackland prairie. And it is not yet the dominant grass here. It’s really on the increase. It took years for us to see any substantial number of plants but a couple of years ago, we saw a huge increase. I don’t know what climate changes or happenings favored that increase but, all of a sudden, all those seed we had put out all those years ago began to—to show up and began to bloom. And so we’re real excited about the potential now of seeing it become a dominant grass once this prairie works its way to climax.
DT: Can we talk about what you mean by climax and succession and what’s the normal course of things?
(misc.)
36:38 – 2011
BB: The concept of a climax grassland probably would vary somewhat from botanist to botanist or ecologist to ecologist but to me, it basically means the dominant plant community that would have been in the particular site, in the absence of outside disturbance by humans. You know, basically what was here when the first European people came or perhaps even when the first native Americans began to—to get involved with manipulation of habitat say, 15,000 years ago. But essentially it means, you know, what was there on a given site under natural conditions before any kind of manipulation or—or adverse consequences from civilization. So what we’re aiming for—it’s a progression, a slow progression back toward a climax situation. It would take right now—this meadow—this meadow—we started planting in 1969 below the edge of the hill and this was planted in the early ‘70’s. So it’s taken us, you know, 25 to 30 years of—of diligent work and adding to it as—where we could to get what we have right now. This prairie would fool most people but a—somebody who really knows the prairie would look at the ground and look at the species composition and look at it very carefully and would say, this may be a planted meadow but it would fool 90% of the botanists that would see it. So it’s—it’s gradually progressing. There are things that we know are missing from it. There are things that we are seeing improve like the tilth of the soil, the amount of earthworm castings. We bought, just to save it, about a 25 acre prairie about—about 10 mile—oh about 8 miles away. And comparing the two, in that prairie, we can actually plunge our hand down into the earthworm castings. Here you’d hurt your fingers. But—but it’s getting better and better every year.
38:53 – 2011
MB: Really faster than we thought it would.
BB: Yeah, you know, it’s—it’s a long term proposition to replicate a prairie but the great thing about this place right here is that we have collected and we have a genetic pool here that covers basically a 60 or 70 mile radius. We hit nearly every single meadow remnant anywhere around here and collected seed off it at one time or another. And so and most of them are gone now.
MB: (talking at same time) roadsides, and railroad rights-of-way and old cemeteries…
39:25 – 2011
BB: Right. And see nearly all of them are gone. I mean, basically what this thing or this little place does is it preserves the genetic diversity of maybe 100 sites that have already been destroyed. And so that’s why it’s sort of a—it’s sort of our baby, so to speak. We get out here and look at it like we’re looking at grandchildren. And we’re awful proud of it and hopefully, you know, we can make some arrangement that it’ll continue after our lives are—are over. You know, that’s what we intend to do.
DT: Are y’all planning to use it as a borrow site for seeds?
40:01 – 2011
BB: Yeah, we—we get seed off of it every now and then and we let other—other people have seed off of it for prairie experiments or for wildflower gardens and things like that. It’s…
MB: We’ve even harvested seed for special projects and given it away or sold it.
BB: We gave a lot of seed to the Corp of Engineers to start a prairie down at Granger Lake. We’ve given some to the Corp of Engineers at—at Lake Belton. We’ve started seed, you know, given seed to start to friends and neighbors and I have a cousin who’s a rancher in Limestone County and—and he has utilized it commercially. That is, he has put large blocks in and grazes it in the Savory or rotational grazing system, the paddock system that originated in South Africa.
40:47 – 2011
MB: And he’s harvested seed…
BB: And harvested seed off of it and grows more beef on the native prairie properly managed than he can grow on any other type of grass with absolutely no input except management. He doesn’t have to fertilize. He doesn’t have to do anything.
MB: He was fortunate enough to be able to put it in with the help of the CRP program and federal dollars which helped him do the whole job.
41:11 – 2011
BB: So he’s a—people go to his place for tours all the time and it’s basically the same grasses—came off this place. The seed all came off this place.
DT: Can you talk about the improved grasses (loud noise)…
41:31 – 2011
MB: Well, humans are experimentally inclined and also humans tend to—we—unfortunately we have a little streak in us, I think, that says there’s bound to be something somewhere that will let me abuse it and still get something out of it. Instead of trying to learn to manage what they have. With perfectly good intentions, the Soil Conservation immediately after World War II spread KR Bluestem, a—an Asian grass all over the state of Texas and it is probably the sorriest, invading grass you can have short of buffle grass which they also introduced down around—from San Antonio south. Other well intentioned people brought in Bermuda which a lot of folks still like but it is still a horrible pest in many—under many circumstances. Other well intentioned people brought in the Johnson grass which is the bane of agriculture all over the state of Texas and, in fact, as far north until it starts getting a freeze kill, you know, where the ground gets cold enough to kill it during the winter. The love grasses from Africa were brought in and some of them have escaped and are—you know, are a nuisance. So people are always—again it’s the old rule of the law of unintended consequences. What looked like a great grass in Africa, where it had natural enemies, natural grazing animals to control it, a different climate and everything, what looked great in Africa is a total pest here. Or what looks great on the slopes of Asia is a total pest here and worth very little. In fact, if you counted in the eradication costs and the control cost, it’s a def—it’s a deficit position you’re in with KR Bluestem. It doesn’t provide enough grazing to feed a burro but it is a horrible competitor for—for good and better grasses for the native grasses. So, you know, people who deal with the non-natives and who introduce the latest fad in anything are playing with some pretty dangerous historical facts and that is, that you bring in a weed and turn loose of it with no natural controls, it’s just like fire ants. It’s just like the—the aquatic weeds that are choking out our lakes and waterways. Florida spends zillions of dollars every year trying to chop up, poison or otherwise control the weeds that control—that fill its canals, you know. And waste all its water. So—and people are—do that oftentimes, you know, with the best of intentions. But they just don’t look down the road to…
44:22 – 2011
MB: And I think sometimes there’s a certain amount of glamour especially with the researchers who decide they want to research a new grass and bring it into the U.S. especially one from Africa. It’s more—much more exciting than researching something here and on their home turf. And so then they get all enthusiastic about this discovery they’ve made and they want the whole world to appreciate and enjoy it. Or somebody decides they want to make money off of it and so they introduce this new grass and I think that just—we have a tendency to glamorize those things that aren’t right here underfoot. And I think that was true in Gideon Linsicomb’s(?) time and he was the writer I told you about earlier who had—and the amateur scientist who in the 1850’s was lamenting the loss of prairie grasses in Texas. And the fact that ranchers and farmers at the time didn’t value those grasses being—as being the best grasses for the land that they owned because they had evolved here and they were adapted to the climate and all. And he was finding them then only in the roadsides and only in the fence roads in the Fayette Prairie which was developed early on and the settled earlier than the Blackland or parts of the Blackland.
45:36 – 2011
MB: When you think of the law of unintended consequences, I can tell you a little story—it won’t take long but it—it grew out of my service on the Parks & Wildlife Commission. Texas has a problem in that wherever you have large power plants, you have cooling lakes built adjacent to them. Those cooling lakes have a much higher temperature in many parts of the lake than is normal for Texas waters. So normal fish won’t survive in those warm waters. With every good intention, the Fisheries Department of Texas, you know, in the Parks and Wildlife Department, started researching and trying to find some foreign fish that could survive in warm water. And they brought us—obviously we were not going to just, you know, bring them in without experimentation. They brought us a—a—a series of articles about certain fish. One was an Australian fish that could live and—and reproduce in water that would get as high as 90°. So I asked them to get me all the publications that they could find on this fish. I wanted to just see what it was really like. When I started reading the Australian reports, the fish, in certain waters, grew to over 100 pounds and the quote was “has been known to eat small kangaroos”. Now I could just see mother on the bank as her toddler goes down to the—to the water for one of our introduced fish, just leap up and swallow—swallow the kid. But, you know, it—the fish would’ve worked just fine in warm power plant lake waters but it might have been a total disaster for the people and—and the other species exposed to it. So, you know, we—Texas Parks & Wildlife has been very leery of introductions since at least that time and really has—has steered clear of it as a general proposition. But that was one example of the fish grow—grew to be over 100 pounds and been known to eat small kangaroos. Might as well put piranha in the—in the lake if you’re going to do that. We had a lot of fun with our prairie and hopefully it’ll keep on growing and developing and being, you know, gradually working its way back to the condition it was—it would have been in a hundred years ago. But—but even if it never really does that, we’ve had a great experience in trying to get there, you know, and we’ve learned an awful lot about the botany of the—of the prairies. And so it’s been—it’s been worth all the time and effort we put into it just for the experience of it if nothing else, and the education.
48:25 – 2011
MB: Well we learned so much about—about other ecosystems because we could relate what we learned here to others and we realized there was so little left of the Blackland prairie that it must be true in other eco regions. So we started looking into the history of other eco regions and discovered that maybe they weren’t cropped but for 50 years they were grazed to nothing by goats or sheep. They may not be grazed anymore but you look back in the history books and you see that they have been heavily managed for 100 years. So there’s very little left that’s natural in any eco region in Texas, even those that aren’t so populated as the Blackland prairie. Some of them recover with a little more ease because they were rougher terrain, maybe it was a little bit harder for grazing animals to get into some of the areas and once they become no good for grazing animals, they may get sold to some city person who wants the area for recreation and just wants a wild area and doesn’t graze it and leaves it alone and so those little tiny pockets start to spread out and you see—especially in the hill country, some of those places coming back on their own just because they’re not being grazed anymore. But there are—so there are differences in eco regions. You—you see some have more hope and you can delay conservation work on those areas for a little while while you hit those that need help immediately like the Blackland because there’s maybe 1/10 of 1% left and that’s going to
49:57 – 2011
go in the next 10 years if you don’t preserve something. So I was—I was very fortunate when I was on the board of the Nature Conservancy to play a role in some Blackland Prairie Conservation and this was a real strong interest of mine and I was able to focus the board’s interest and—and—on that need. And I wasn’t alone because there was a study about that time that had been done by the National Office that prioritized eco region needs all over the U.S. and the Blackland Prairie came in as number 5 and needed protection in the U.S. at that time. That was the mid ‘80’s. And so there was sort of a demand in from the national office, do something in the Blackland Prairie. So it had their backing and it was easy to persuade the state to go ahead and act. And during that time the Clymer meadow—Clymer’s Meadow as it’s more properly called, became available and we were able to purchase a very beautiful remnant which is now being managed by the Nature Conservancy and is open to the public. And—and they’ve learned a lot in their management of that Blackland Prairie because they burned it frequently for several years and thought that was the ideal management tool and found out that it—it wasn’t really the ideal tool. Some things they didn’t want to increase were increasing so now they’re experimenting with buffalo. It’s not a very big tract of buffalo but the—they say they’re only going to bring in 8, I think, and—and graze them for a very short period of time till the growth is at a certain level and then send them back to wherever they came from. So it’s—it’s another experiment but it would be more close to the natural type of management that—that nature would…
51:45 – 2011
BB: (?) acquired the prairie—the prairie at (?)
MB: We did. We acquired the—very small prairie over at Marlin but it’s about the average size of prairie remnants in this section of Blackland. And that was something that I brought to the attention of the staff during my tenure and sort of blackmailed them into getting, I have to say, because I was not 100% happy when they voted to bring in honey creek because it just was so over-grazed and was not as natural as I would have wanted our first major acquisition to be. And they wanted something, we were getting a lot of pressure from the national office to do something, we needed to do something and we’d been a little slow moving and so we jumped on that one and the staff said, okay, if you’ll bring us a prairie we’ll do it. If you’ll bring us a good one so I very quickly brought them the first one I found that was available and that was the Linhardt(?)—it’s a modern prairie but it’s now called the Linhardt prairie because a lot of the funding came from a woman named Dorothy Lindhardt.
DT: And where…
52:47 – 2011
MB: It’s near Marlin. The Clymer’s Meadow is northeast of Dallas near oh, Green—I’d say Greenville and the Leonard Prairie is near Marlin, Texas—between Marlin and Waco but closer to Marlin.
(walking)
55:01 – 2011
BB: The Black Sampson blues with very, very pretty pale purple petals, these have faded and are about to drop out. In fact, if you touch them they’d probably come on out. Yeah. The seed head is this dark color and eventually will look just about like that. And it’s just full—packed full of seeds. And the people tell me that the root farms a—an herb tea that some people like to use.
MB: Bob’s not so popular with modern health food stores and doesn’t know what a big seller Echinacea is. He also doesn’t know that people—when they find an Echinacea field will go in an rob it so mum’s the word.
(misc.)
55:56 – 2011
MB: It’s a very valuable herb now because it supposedly has high—it’s very helpful in fighting off viruses. So if you’re coming down with a cold, you take Echinacea.
(misc.)
56:30
BB: The levy—you asked about the levies and the terraces. Truthfully, I should have taken the dozer and leveled them out before we started the planting. I did take a maintainer that a neighbor of mine owned and fill in the worst of the gullies but I was too much in a hurry to get the planting to, you know, there’s only a window of a certain amount of time and if you get caught by the rains, you’ll never get back in there to plant. So I didn’t take the time to take the dozer and really level those old erosion control structures. That was a serious mistake. I should have done that because, ever since then, on tops of the levies is a weedy area that is—that has been slow to be colonized by the prairie grasses. They’re gradually getting there but it was—it had a strip of weeds along every levy for years and years. Even today, the composition is not as good as it is out here in the flatland.
57:24 – 2011
MB: And that’s because of the drier nature of the tops of those levies…
(talking at same time)
57:31 – 11
BB: …it disturbs the soil. When rainfall—heavy rains come it—that erosion off the top creates a disturbance and that favors the weedy species. So it’s—it’s a shame but we learn as we go I guess sometimes.
MB: We really had no idea at the time anyway.
57:50 – 2011
BB: Well at the time we were doing this, nobody in Texas had—had tried a replicated prairie. We were—this was the biggest planting anybody had ever heard of and is the earliest one anybody knows of. So…
MB: R.C. Mauldin(?) had experimented a lot with prairie plants…
(talking at same time)
MB: …big advocate of prairie plants but he’d really never tried a…
BB: Never tried a prairie.
MB: …plant community restoration
DT: Who were some of the experts?
58:18 – 2011
BB: Arnold and Fred were not in the picture at the time that we started. There was one SCS man named Carl Young who was very interested in native grasses, not in necessarily the whole component but he was very interested in it. And he had kind of been keeping an eye for years on the little—some of the little hay meadows in east Bell—Bell County. The Czech and German farmers had continued to use for the milk cow hay in grazing but never heavily grazing them. And so he—he knew of several of those and he had kind of watched them and he encouraged Mickey and I. And he got us some small packets of prairie seed from some experimental plantings at Knox City that had been done by the Soil Conservation Service looking to see if they could commercially grow wildflowers and things like that. And they had planted them in rows and he got us some small packets of that. The great book of what we planted came from our own collections but he did get that. But main thing…
59:20 – 2011
MB: He also identified some local prairie remnants for us…
BB: Yeah, he identified some local prairie remnants and he was very encouraging. Carl Young was a—was a real fine person. He’s dead now, died of cancer some years ago but…
MB: Wasn’t he just a local…
BB: Just a local field…
MB: …office. He wasn’t in the state office which is in Temple.
BB: Right, no he was in—he was a—he was basically a field worker with the Soil Conservation Service…
MB: Now Carl Rut…
BB: C. A. Rekinteen(?) was interested…
59:49 – 2011
MB: Now he was with the state office and knew a lot about the forbs and legumes.
BB: But basically we—we learned most of what we learned from just going to the botany texts and…
(talking at same time)
MB: Also we sought out professionals with more knowledge like Fred Smeins—Dr. Fred Smeins at A&M and Dr. Fred Gelbach at Baylor and others who had some expertise and they were helpful. But we sought them out.
01:00:21 – 2011
BB: And then R. C. Mauldin who’s deceased was a—a—lived in Waco and had Southwest Seed Service. He had been a farmer, plant materials specialist for the SCS down around San Antonio many years before. He was kind of a maverick but he was an interesting little man and he—he liked prairies. He knew where every remnant around was and he’d go collect a few seeds every year and plant them here and there in rows—his little nursery up there at Waco, Robinson. And so R.C. became a close friend and he helped us identify some of the plants that were more, you know, unusual and esoteric, harder to key out and everything like that. And we—we got a lot of benefit out of that association.
01:01:08 – 2011
MB: I think that he actually, and I may be wrong on this—correct me if I’m wrong Bob, didn’t he leave the SCS out of frustration because they were not really valuing the natives like he though they should. So he was one of the early people in that field who saw the value of the natives but was not really appreciated for that.
BB: He was a prophet that was without honor in his own country, so to speak.
01:01:40 – 11
MB: There’s some white flower compass plant which these people may enjoy seeing.
(?)
BB: Notice this leaf is very much serrated just like the tall ones but this plant never grows any more than about that. They’re almost the same species but they’re—they’re very closely related but they—one has white flowers and grows short and one has—has the yellow flowers and grows 6 or 7 feet tall.
01:02:11 – 2011
MB: And there’s the purple prairie clover. One little bloom left. You want to pick it and show it? Similar to the white prairie clover as far as its value to the prairie. The legumes are very valuable to the prairie because they do introduce nitrogen, build nitrogen and improve the prairie soil.