BY LEW MOORES
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Jim Mundy of the Hamilton Country Park District surveys a field of wildflowers.
(Tony Jones photo)
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CROSBY TOWNSHIP -- Jim Mundy wades out into the field and within moments is waist-deep in grey-headed cornflower, stiff goldenrod and New England aster, compass plants that have been in flower and now reach upwards.
Amid the tall larkspur and the broad leaves of prairie dock, he spies the delicate elegance and red flowers of the royal catchfly, which arrests the eye on this spread of color.
"They will do their own thing and you don't have to baby them along," Mr. Mundy, land management assistant for the Hamilton County Park District, says of this buffer of prairie flowers and grasses that lies along the hike-bike path at Miami Whitewater Forest. "And this is what you get -- you get color like this."
All along much of the Shaker Trace Trail and beyond it, stretching at points deep into what had been farmland, is an explosion of colors and shapes in fields of wildflowers. It's an upbeat landscape for those out on the trail jogging, riding bicycles, Rollerblading or just plain strolling.
A Shaker Trace Trail hiker or biker might encounter bergamot.
(Tony Jones photo)
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But the park district had more than aesthetics in mind -- within years, park officials hope, this prairie habitat will grow to 700 acres as more farmland owned by the park district is converted. Already, at about 250 acres, it is the largest prairie habitat in the region.
Prairies and wetlands are two of the most endangered ecosystems in North America, and Ohio is second only to California in wetland loss because of development and agriculture.
At Miami Whitewater Forest, park officials have been working for years researching the extant habitats and how best to reintroduce them in this pocket of Southwest Ohio.
"The last time I was out there it was really hard to concentrate on biking, the flowers were so beautiful," said Sandra Geiser, a Clifton resident who bikes the Shaker Trace Trail two or three times a month.
"I almost felt like I was in Monet's garden. I have not seen such a profusion of flowers. I did not realize they had consciously done that. It made it seem like a different trail. So much color around it."
At one time, park officials say, Hamilton County had close to 4,000 acres of prairie and more than 2,500 acres of wetlands, a conclusion they based on studying surveyors' maps from the late 1700s.
Most of it had disappeared, the victim of farming and development over the past two centuries. Prairies were wiped out by the 1980s and slightly more than 1,000 acres of wetlands remained, mostly in the Oxbow region near the Indiana border.
This decade, the park district began an ambitious plan to restore both in the Miami Whitewater area using native plants. It purchased contiguous farmland, starting with a modest 20-acre cornfield that was flooded, and then allowed nature to take its course. Green plants and cattails appeared.
More than 1,200 acres were eventually purchased. The district established a nursery in 1992 to grow native plants, including prairie plants, and cultivated the seeds. More wetland area was added, and now there are 130 acres of wetlands in the park.
The 50-foot buffer of prairie plants on either side of the Shaker Trace Trail was begun three years ago.
"We told everybody that it takes three years to really start seeing the prairie plants coming up," said John Klein, land manager for the park district. "The first year or two it's growing a deep root system. Then by the third year they get to be pretty showy."
Showy as in a quilt of pale and deep yellows, purple, red, orange, shades of green, all laced with a spray of white, flowing along the trail before yielding to fields of soybeans.
Buoyed by its success, the park district also planted 4 acres of prairie plants on a section in Woodland Mound in Anderson Township. Because prairie needs more room to truly spread its wings, the Woodland Mound prairie will be used for interpretive purposes, such as educational programs.
"It's important because we're trying to preserve ecological diversity of the area," Mr. Klein said. "These plants have long since been gone, plowed under by farmers or developers. If you add to the biodiversity of the area, that in turn attracts a lot of different wildlife" -- like Northern harriers, American bitterns, barn owls, which have all but disappeared; and various species of butterflies and moths that live in their immature stages only on specific plants.
It could take another 10 years before most all the farmland owned by the park district is reclaimed for prairie, when purple coneflowers and rattlesnake-master and lance leaf coreopsis and stiff-leaved sunflower and black-eyed susan are planted and spread.
Perhaps here and there the fields will be dabbed with royal catchfly: Dozens of species of plants, sown with some thought given to the promise of a bloom in stages from early spring through the fall. A landscape that again suggests the way things were.
