Landscaping with native plants has encouraged gardeners from the Midwest and beyond to embark on a profound scientific, ecological, and emotional partnership with nature. Benjamin Vogt shares his expertise with prairie plants in a richly photographed guide aimed at gardeners and homeowners, making big ideas about design approachable and ......
A common group of plants in the Midwest's natural areas, the oval sedges supply food for wildlife while their roots bind the soil and their vegetation creates habitat. Carex of Illinois and Surrounding States: The Oval Sedges offers a guide to the identification, distribution, and natural history of this diverse group of plants. Focused on the ......
The wild plants in this book tell stories of land, people, and food. As renowned botanist Kelly Kindscher guides us through over one hundred edible plants in this beautiful field guide, we find that foraging has always been an important part of prairie life.Before colonization, Native American women were the primary gatherers of wild plants, which ......
Scattered throughout the Great Plains are many isolated areas of varying size and ecology, quite distinct from the surrounding grasslands. Such spaces can be uplands like the Black Hills, low hills like the Nebraska Sand Hills, or linear areas such as shallow river valleys and deeply incised canyons. While the notion of ""islands"" is not a new ......
Gathering its waters from the plains of Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska, the Kaw is truly America's prairie river; the only one to arise entirely on the Great Plains and traverse all three major grasslands-shortgrass, mixed-grass, and tallgrass prairies. James Locklear's In the Country of the Kaw is a joyous exploration of the realm of the Kaw ......
How do you know when you're face to face with a fringe-leaf ruellia? Is that particular flower button gayfeather or dotted gayfeather? And what about the pod clinging to your pants? Could it have come from a bird-foot trefoil?For anyone venturing out into the wilds of Kansas and the region, identifying plants just got a whole lot easier. Michael ......
In the wake of colonization, in a landscape of loss and dispossession, can we rediscover ways to share the land with other creatures and one another? When the government recently tried to abandon its responsibility to protect what little remains of the natural prairie, Trevor Herriot pushed back, only to discover an injustice haunting the lands ......
An expert on the buffalo tells the history of this keystone species through extensive research and beautiful photographs. The mere mention of the buffalo instantly brings to mind the vast herds that once roamed the North American continent, and few wild animals captivate our imaginations as much as the buffalo do. Once numbering in the tens of ......
The High Plains region was once called the Great American Desert and thought to be, in the words of explorer Stephen Long, "wholly unfit for cultivation." Now we know that beneath the surface, unbeknownst to the explorers and early settlers, lies the Ogallala aquifer, an underground formation that stretches for 800 miles from the Texas panhandle ......
