An article about a woman who bought a mountain and dedicated herself to restoring a native meadow by removing invasive species and nurturing native Virginia plants.
Her kids had gone to college, she’d always been fascinated by the natural world, and she’d been reading about ecological restoration—the process of ridding land of invasive species and returning it to its native state. This mountain, which was for sale, seemed like a prime location to try it; the plants had grown taller than her head, and a mist of yellow flowers wafted as far as she could see.
“Leaving aside the fact that I was terrible at growing things and I really didn’t know anything about plants, I felt like, okay, I’m just going to do this,” she says. So she bought the land and began to transform old fields into a 75-acre meadow of native Virginia plants. Whyman describes the unrelenting labor of stewarding her meadow. She can’t simply let it grow, since invasive plants tend to, well, invade. Their seeds lie dormant in the ground for years. They migrate on the backs of deer, blow over from neighbors’ fields, or drift down the river onto Whyman’s land, where they proliferate and choke out her beloved. In the book, Whyman spends many days trotting around her property with an enormous metal weed wrench, pulling plants that don’t belong. She experiments with controlled burns and meticulously applies pesticides to encroaching invasive trees. By now, she’s accepted that she’ll never fully rid the mountain of invasives: “I’m trying to get the meadow under—‘control’ is the wrong word, but I’m trying to calm it down and manage things, at least.” Centuries ago, native meadows like Whyman’s covered huge swaths of Virginia. “When we think of prairie, we mainly think of the Midwest,” she says, “but there was prairie all throughout the South.” These grasslands were maintained by lightning-induced fires and managed through indigenous controlled burns. Then came European agricultural practices. Settlers leveled the prairies to plant row crops and deluged the ground with nonnative seeds
ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION Invasive SPECIES NATIVE PLANTS GRASSLANDS ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION
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