Touring the Tallgrass Prairie
[Music] a lot of gardeners in Oklahoma have a great interest in our wild flowers or native plants and we happen to be in a prairie that has just an incredible amount of native plants a lot of wild flowers we see all kinds of things out here in fact we could say there's a lot more diversity probably more so than you would see in some of our other prairies and areas around the state well joining us is Dr Ron Terell Steve nice to be here today welcome to the program Dr Terell is is a botney professor at OSU and uh Dr Terell why is there so much diversity in this particular Prairie okay Steve we're standing in the middle of a tall grass Prairie that is cut for Prairie hay once a year and so we have conditions that are perhaps duplicating what it was like before Europeans arrived on on the scene the site we're at as you look around you is a area known locally as the Manning Prairie it was uh purchased by the Manning family in the 1930s and has been maintained as a a Hayfield for the past several decades okay uh it's kind of an interesting place and a little bit different for most uh Prairie sites and it's very comparable to ones that we have all around the state small tracks of land anywhere from just a few acres to perhaps a quarter of an a section or so there used to be a railroad track along the north over here uhhuh and the trains coming along uh often would uh set Prairie fires that would maintain the character of the Prairie keep the shrubs at Bay and then uh Mr Manning when he began to cut it for hay once a year did something a little bit different than most people do he uh would cut in August rather than the normal July and as a result a lot of the Prairie species that we have here would have a greater chance to produce seeds and fruits and so we have a tremendous diversity of plants okay and uh as far as like livestock grazing uh this area has never been plowed uh and as far as I know um if cattle have been running here just occasionally okay many of the species that we'll see as we later on this morning uh are indicators that the that's really in pristine condition a lot of species are that are species that would appear if it had been uh heavily grazed so a lot of these plants wouldn't be here because the the cattle seem to love to relish them they come back and eat on them repeatedly okay so it's it's been uh pretty well preserved yes okay beautiful site exciting place to be okay well let's look at some of these plants right over here I see a wonderful little uh now here's something several years ago when I saw this plant for the first time I really got excited because I had only seen it before in uh the south central part of the state this is marelia cespitosa Barbara's buttons it's a member of the sunflower family uh what you're looking at is not just an individual flower but a whole cluster of flowers these ones at the edge have already opened and then the ones in the center uh have yet to open over the next uh several days they'll gradually open just a few at a time okay so we have a whole cluster of flowers right there it's characteristic we refer to that as a head or a capitulum to use the technical term okay all right well okay let's look at a few of these these plants back here this uh here here's a really showy blue plant that we've uh We've shown in our Gardens uh but uh as you can see it's a naturally occurring plant yes this is the baptisia Australis or the wild blue indigo it's one of several indigos that we have in the state and this one's a little bit unusual in that it's not quite as tall and as erect as uh many of its relatives are normally it'll be perhaps half again as tall it's a member of the Pea family uh and it's should be obvious by the rather spectacular peike flower or papalous flower as we say and that word comes from from uh if you'll think of the French and my favorite when I tell my students about this I remind them of the movie papon with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman and if you'll remember what uh papon had tattooed on his side was the butterfly butf and you can see a rather fanciful resemblance to the butterfly with a large petal known as the standard or the banner then two petals to the side the wings and then two petals that are fused together to form structure similar to a the Keel of a boat and that's the papalous flower well right down here we have a little pale pink member of the I think the Hibiscus family right this is kaleroy aloides the pale Prairie malow uh uh one of the easiest families to recognize the malvas with the stamans fused into a staminal column uh in the very center of the flower now you said hibiscus everyone knows the Hibiscus can you think of what other members of this family uh have this same sort of flower looks similar to the okra okra definitely which is also a member of the genus hibiscus and cottonon is a member of this family as well if we're lucky we'll find a another one called the cowboy mow which has a magenta or wine cup that should be out here as well maybe we'll see one of those a little bit later right well right back here uh we've got some some very showy plants and Dr ter it seems like we have a lot of lot of this this little plant these little shrubs a little silvery silvery colored uh shrub they're just everywhere out here okay this one is not particularly exciting right now but give it just a few weeks here and there'll be a beautiful deep purple blue cluster of flowers it's also a member of the legume family or the PE family uh and this is amoressence amoressence lead plant lead plant you can see where it gets the name lead plant because the hair the leaves are covered with gray hairs that give it somewhat of a a gray cast a silvery gray cast to it now L it doesn't yes exactly doesn't look very exciting right now but if a cow was out here a cow would be this would be the equivalent of a Brams ice cream uh sunde with extra chocolate and extra whipping cream on it this is a plant that is really is a good indicator of the grazing conditions uh it's highly palatable uh highly nutritious cattle seek it out repeatedly and it's one of the first plants to disappear when there's heavy grazing pressure in a in a prairie so we know by its abundance here uh that we don't have those conditions okay but uh but yeah I guess with if we had some catle out here this would be one of the first to go well one of the first to go okay and as I mentioned it's a member of the PE family and if you look just past it here's another member of the Pea family with small papalous or those butterfly flowers again this is scurf pea uh selia ten tenum scurf PE it's also a of the family it's kind of like the uh the the false blue indigo only lot smaller a lot smaller uh some uh might remind some of our viewers of metago the alphalpha flowers are very it does look similar to alphalpha well let's go back here and uh look at look at some some more of these native plants well Dr Terell we've been seeing this yellow flower a lot out here on the Prairie which one is that okay you can't escape the family again it's another member of the sunflower family coreopsis Grand floro one of our uh tick seeds it and its relatives have been brought into cultivation I'm sure you have some established at the gardens they actually do yeah uh beautiful thing forms tremendous populations provides showy color and one of our spectacular wild flowers you know I when I said you can't escape the family the there's three families in the state that dominate the landscape the sunflower family the asteras with about 300 species here in the state 100 gener the grasses the poac which forms the green Matrix or backdrop that we always uh take for granted again about 300 species and then we have the legume family the the fabac which is almost as large with a hundred or so species in the state and those three species you encounter time and time again as we walk okay well Dr Terell this area right here kind of looks like a a crop circle or something uh okay can you tell us maybe what we're looking at here uh uh it's not a crop circle but it is something that's uh rather interesting and a characteristic of our prairies of North America notice the change before I tell you what it is we've come from our prairie grasses and all of a sudden we've got a I'm hoping the color will show up here kind of a darker green that's Spike Rush the genus elois and then as you get into the center and there's a little bit of a depression here we have a buffalo wallow a buffalo wallow okay the Bison that one time dominated the landscape these areas there's probably a a high level of clay in the soil kind of a clay pan here uh would come and to remove parasites and to have a good dusting and so forth would get on their backs and wallow uh and often these wallows will have a rather dis distinctive Flora associated with them because they'll hold water a lot of uh species that require a little bit more moisture will occupy them at various times of the year and because the soil is often very tightly packed uh different species will be present so those those plants that that occupy this area are very appreciative that the the Buffalo came and created a disturbance uh a natural Disturbed area in the in the site and if you notice you can just tell by the color let me come out here and show you this notice this grass right here with a real delicate FL uh cast to it you know you see it right here in the wallow but you don't see it up uh in the surrounding at all this is a grus one of the tickle grasses uh again it's a relative it's uh very small spikelets but it's a relative of the grass that's used in uh putting greens on golf courses and so forth It's a bent grass but it's one of our native bent grasses interesting and then as one looks around they have a number of different sges here members of the cyer AC uh and you could see how this one could be kind of a pretty little thing in a water garden or in a in a wetland situation okay so they they also uh need the the extra moisture that this Buffalo wallow has created and then right behind them here I'm gonna go ahead and pull one here just the top part of the plant this very inconspicuous sge I'm hoping it'll show up here this is Spike Rush uh it's a flowering plant and it's actually already passed flowering and into Fruit here uh naked stems and then bearing a a tight cluster of flowers right at the very end of the stem there okay so we have grasses and then these little grass-like plants okay graminoids the and characteristic of slightly wetter SES okay well let's move on out of the Buffalo wall and see what else we can find find well Dr Terell this is a neat little white flowering plant it's probably been catching your eye as we've been walking across the Prairie here this is one of our species that's almost an endemic to Oklahoma in fact it even has the name um pensan Oklahoma anus the specific epithet Oklahoma enus in a sense reflects its geographical distribution if it wasn't just for a couple of counties in Kansas and a couple of counties in Texas this would be a true endemic meaning found just within the borders of Oklahoma that's that's incredible at least we got to name it after our state yes uh it's really a spectacular little plant although it's not quite as showy as some of its relatives it's a member of the scrary AC the Fig wart family um our viewers probably would recognize its relatives Snapdragon for example or Fox Glove also another member of the same family the common name often used for it is Beard's tongue and that's because it has five stamms now this one's not going to show it very well five stamms four fertile and one I don't know if I can get it out here or not one you can see the yellow there little hairs hairs it's a sterile stamman with hairs on it we call that a staminodial and hence the name Beard's tongue a bearded tongue incredible okay you know as we look at this one it's one of its relatives is just a little ways down here let's go look at it in comparison about 10 yards away here yeah that's one of the exciting things about being in a prairie such as this you can take 10 steps look down and there'll be something different there here we have as you can see another penan this is the big shy one that often people will see along the roadsides and so forth much larger flowers okay the paman Cobia or Cobia some people pronounce it and it's a little easier to see how it's a true member of the scrary AC with that uh strongly two lipped corala there uh interesting it it'll have a considerable variation in color this one's pretty white but you'll see some well even you can see some of the variation on little bit of pinkish the buds that are opening uh yeah I I love the coloration down down inside the uh the flower there and it does look somewhat like a like a huge Snap Dragon yes exactly well the uh the change is uh certainly noticeable as we we come down the hill what we've done is we've been walking we've walked over onto a North facing slope here and as you may be able to see is looking at the abundance of the grasses they've started thinning out a little bit and as we go just a little bit farther all of a sudden we come to an area where we have essentially no grasses at all and then a profusion of a little annual plant in here notice how the soil uh obviously quite Rocky here uh much thinner here uh and we you've remember this expression from one of my classes notice the change absolutely change in the environmental conditions often is accompanied by a change in the plants that are present and we're standing in the middle of our a population of our state wildflower I almost hate to step on there's cuz there's so many here but there there they're so okay Gardia Pella this is another member of the sunflower family and can you see the little spider that's right there on those yeah individual corala these three loed what look like petals you know the old loves me loves me not actually are three loed uh coras in in tack flowers and there's a little spider right on one and then in the center we have and those are called Ray flowers or Ray flits individual flowers individual flowers and then in the middle uh not quite as showy are the disc flits or disc flowers so again we have the head here head collection of flowers and this is our state wildflower uh many people know mistletoe that is now our state floral emblem a taxonomist by the name of Doyle McCoy many of our viewers are familiar with his roadside wildf flowers of Oklahoma book got the picture on the front cut it he's the individual who almost single-handedly lobbied the state legislature to have this plant designated as our state wildflower a number of years ago and it's certainly a uh an interesting uh most appropriate Choice it's we call it um Indian blanket it's also known as Mexican hat it's also known as glad flower also known as come home husband be he ever so drunk flow incredible won't try to explain to you the story behind that last name but uh many different common names for a a really a spectacular wildf flower and while we're seeing this one with somewhat of an orange red and yellow you can there's tremendous variation in the the Hues that uh are produced by this plant you'll find some that are almost yellow some that are orange some are deep red yeah well I think this is much shower than the mistletoe yes we'll see what else we can find Dr Terell well Dr Terell our Oklahoma proven perennial for this year is a plant that was hybridized from one of our native plants the uh Magnus purple cone flower and it was hybridized from eonia peria but this looks like a totally different cone flow can you tell us a little bit about it this is easia palad the Prairie cone flower uh a little bit different from uh some of the other members of the of the genus because it produces white pollen rather than the yellow uh regular yellow pollen that we associate with the genus and it is really a quite an unusual plant as you can see just on this individual plant here there's quite a bit of variation in the color of these structures now I'm going to quiz you boy just see if you've been paying attention these structures around the edge are those petals or something else those are Ray flits Ray flits and entire flowers that we're looking at in fact we could go loves me loves me not pull them off and we'd be pulling off individual flowers there not petals not petals or they're actually five fuse petals together and then as the heads mature MH uh the ray flits will will droop and give kind of a a ringed appearance here in fact there's one right over here that we could look at oh yeah it's a little bit wind blown but you can still get the feeling for it uh in that the ray flits have drooped down and then what's especially exciting you can see right at the edge of the center of the head here are individual disc flats that are opening and are and are getting ready to shed their pollen and then eventually they uh when fertilization occurs the aines will be produced and we'll have the Next Generation being dispersed okay well Dr Terrell if our viewers are interested in learning more about native plants and wild flowers what do you suggest no I have just the solution uh they ought to participate in some of the activities of the okoma Native Plant Society this was a group formed in the late 1980s to promote awareness of our state uh wild flowers and it comprises approximately 500 members right now with chapters in Tulsa Stillwater Oklahoma City and what we do is we get out in the field and look at wild flowers we sponsor field trips at various times of the year throughout the state just to take people out and and look at the wild flowers when they're in full flower we have monthly meetings where people get together and talk about various aspects of wildf flowers it's uh really a dynamic organization uh and we encourage people to participate you don't have to be a member we' encourage you to be a member but you don't have to be uh but it really is a a way to get out and and to see wild flowers okay um in terms of contacting the society perhaps the best thing to do is to go to the society's website okay uh Oklahoma native PL society and get at it that way okay well Dr Terell thank you so much all right any time to get in the field is is the best time for me okay certainly appre appreciated it here okay okay uh also like to say big thanks to the Manning family for allowing us to uh come and do the tour of Prairie we hope you've enjoyed this classic from the Oklahoma gardening Vault remember even though these tips and techniques are Timeless there's always something new to learn in the world of gardening by subscribing to both Oklahoma gardening and okay gardening Classics you'll have access to a wealth of gardening knowledge both classic and contemporary
2024-03-24 15:57
