Gone to Seed

by Karen Slagle

Canvas Print

$70

Framed Print

$89

Art Print

$28

Poster

$28

Metal Print

$76

Acrylic Print

$84

Wood Print

$56

Throw Pillow

$27

Greeting Card

$6.95

Spiral Notebook

$15

iPhone Case

$27

Title

Gone to Seed

Artist

Karen Slagle

Medium

Photograph - Photography

Description

I was walking around my horse pasture in the Texas panhandle a few days ago while the sun was getting low in the west. I'm always on the lookout for the unusual and I came upon some native grasses waving in the breeze with the sun lighting them from behind. I love these seeds, not sure what they are. If anyone knows please tell me. I used a Nikon D300 with a Nikkor 28-105 lens on macro mode. I edited this image in PSCS6 with texture layer.

Prairies (/ˈprɛəri/) are ecosystems considered part of the temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands biome by ecologists, based on similar temperate climates, moderate rainfall, and a composition of grasses, herbs, and shrubs, rather than trees, as the dominant vegetation type. Temperate grassland regions include the Pampas of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay as well as the steppes of Eurasia. Lands typically referred to as "prairie" tend to be in North America. The term encompasses the area referred to as the Interior Lowlands of the United States, Canada and Mexico, which includes all of the Great Plains as well as the wetter, somewhat hillier land to the east. In the U.S., the area is constituted by most or all of the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and sizable parts of the states of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and western and southern Minnesota. The Central Valley of California is also a prairie. The Canadian Prairies occupy vast areas of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.

According to Theodore Roosevelt: "We have taken into our language the word prairie, because when our backwoodsmen first reached the land [in the Midwest] and saw the great natural meadows of long grasssights unknown to the gloomy forests wherein they had always dweltthey knew not what to call them, and borrowed the term already in use among the French inhabitants."[1] Prairie is the French word for meadow, but the ultimate root is the Latin pratum (same meaning).

The formation of the North American Prairies started with the upwelling of the Rocky Mountains. The mountains created a rain shadow that killed most of the trees.[citation needed]

The parent material of most prairie soil was distributed during the last glacial advance that began about 110,000 years ago. The glaciers expanding southward scraped the landscape, picking up geologic material and leveling the terrain. As the glaciers retreated about 10,000 years ago, it deposited this material in the form of till. Wind based loess deposits also form an important parent material for prairie soils.[2]

Tallgrass Prairie evolved over tens of thousands of years with the disturbances of grazing and fire. Native ungulates such as bison, elk, and white-tailed deer, roamed the expansive, diverse, plentiful grassland before European colonization of the Americas.[3] For 10,000-20,000 years native people used fire annually as a tool to assist in hunting, transportation and safety.[4] Evidence of ignition sources of fire in the tallgrass prairie are overwhelmingly human as opposed to lightning.[5] Humans, and grazing animals, were active participants in the process of prairie formation and the establishment of the diversity of graminoid and forbs species. Fire has the effect on prairies of removing trees, clearing dead plant matter, and changing the availability of certain nutrients in the soil from the ash produced. Fire kills the vascular tissue of trees, but not prairie, as up to 75% (depending on the species) of the total plant biomass is below the soil surface and will re-grow from its deep (up to 6 feet) roots. Without disturbance, trees will encroach on a grassland, cast shade, which suppresses the understory. Prairie and widely spaced oak trees evolved to coexist in the oak savanna ecosystem.[6]

Fertility[edit]

In spite of long recurrent droughts and occasional torrential rains, the grasslands of the Great Plains were not subject to great soil erosion. The root systems of native prairie grasses firmly held the soil in place to prevent run-off of soil. When the plant died, the fungi, bacteria returned its nutrients to the soil.

These deep roots also helped native prairie plants reach water in even the driest conditions. The native grasses suffered much less damage from dry conditions than the farm crops currently grown.