How Greene Is this prairie?

Henry Greene’s master work, the prairie in the UW Arboretum that bears his name, was every inch his own. Today, Greene Prairie is at the heart of a controversy over a proposed development on adjacent land.

If there’s anything people know about Henry Greene, it’s that he knew how to build a prairie. From knowing the makeup of the soil, to the correct placement and grouping of plants, Greene was an artful and methodical recreator of a lost landscape.

His master work, the prairie in the UW Arboretum that bears his name, was every inch his own. Apart from Greene himself and a few trusted friends, no one was permitted to plant, experiment or manipulate the small plot of land that some people think is now the world’s best example of a restored prairie. Those exclusive terms were a written precondition, initialed in 1944 by Aldo Leopold, G. William Longenecker and A.F. Gallistel, when Greene made his proposal for the “establishment and study of a low prairie.”

Greene’s terms were a reflection of his personality — solitary, eccentric, comfortable only in his own knowledge of plants. But even more important, the peculiar exclusivity of Greene’s contract with the technical overseers of the Arboretum is the reason Greene Prairie was an ecological success.

Today, Greene Prairie is at the heart of a controversy over a proposed 95-unit housing development on adjacent land. The development, say those familiar with the prairie, may add to a problem that has slowly been consuming it. During the last decade, as more and more land in Madison and Fitchburg has been given over to development, the capacity of Dunn’s Marsh, the natural reservoir for runoff in the Dunn’s Marsh watershed, has been exceeded. After each heavy rain, the marsh, which has no outlet, overflows and water gushes over the old Chicago & Northwestern Railroad tracks, flooding the low-lying end of Green Prairie. These floods, in addition to sediment and the occasional fish, carry the seeds of reed canary grass, a tough exotic capable of outcompeting and overwhelming any plant Henry Greene ever imported to his experimental prairie.

Henry Greene

The Arboretum’s managers have used fire and herbicides in a years-long effort to defeat the invading grass, but Arboretum ecologist Mark Leach admits that unless the hydrology problem can be solved, the reed canary grass will continue to overrun the prairie. “Until we can get control of the flow of water over the railroad bed, there’s nothing we can do about the reed canary grass. We have to solve the hydrology problem first.”

Set in a shallow depression and bordered by sandy hills deposited by the last glacier when its margin stood west of Lake Wingra, the Greene Prairie and the land around it is a microcosm of what Dane County may have once been like. Framed by oak woods on three sides, the prairie opens to the south to a seemingly expansive vista of a glacial landscape. It is there, across the railroad tracks in Fitchburg, where Indianapolis-based Harlan, Sprague, Dawley, purveyor of laboratory animals, has proposed building a housing development. It is the potential loss of that vista, and the sense of primal isolation the prairie affords, that is the primary concern of those who oppose the development.

There is mutual value, says UW–Madison botany professor and prairie expert Tom Givnish, to the Arboretum of course, but also to Fitchburg, to consider “preserving both the vista and ecological communities of a spectacular wet prairie. (It is) a fact that five or 50 years from now no one is going to want to take their son or daughter, or grandson or granddaughter, to see how beautiful the Harlan, Sprague, Dawley development is.”

Born into a wealthy and conservative Indiana family, Henry Campbell Greene first came to the University of Wisconsin as a graduate student. He trained as a mycologist and received his doctorate here in 1933. Although a member of the botany department, he did not teach. But he was considered an outstanding authority on the parasitic fungi of plants, writing two dozen papers and two books on the subject. He was also the right-hand man for John Curtis and played an essential role in support of Curtis’ signal contribution to the field of ecology, “The Vegetation of Wisconsin,” the authoritative description of the state’s plant communities.

It was probably with Curtis, on frequent excursions in the 1930s to the state’s prairie relics — old cemeteries, railroad rights of way, and the last undeveloped tracts of southern Wisconsin — when Greene first became enamored with the prairie. In 1940, that familiarity became a compelling interest, according to Thomas Blewett, whose 1981 thesis describes the development of Greene Prairie. In 1942, Greene first surveyed the future site of his prairie, when it was “but a few years removed from a long succession of ill-advised, sporadic and spotty attempts at cultivation.”

Greene himself recorded his efforts, from the first geological surveys and soil maps to a complete catalog of the plants that existed on the land before he undertook his meticulous and solitary restoration. His records, consisting of eight annual reports, one biennial report and one six-year summary report, and scores of grid maps indicating precisely where and when individual groups of plants were planted, are unique for a restoration. That documentation, coupled with what some ecologists think was an unparalleled knowledge of the necessary microhabitat and prairie plant groupings, that makes Green Prairie special among prairie restorations.

Greene Prairie is less a scientific wonder than a technological marvel, says Leach. The prairie is as precise a reconstruction of a lost landscape as exists anywhere, and the blueprints reside in Henry Greene’s detailed records, neatly typed on onion-skin paper, in the basement archive of the Arboretum’s McKay Center. The prairie, says Leach, is a textbook on how to rebuild one very complicated component of nature.

“It wasn’t clear that he was doing it to advance a theory,” says Leach. “It was testing his skill at building something. It was new. No one had tried to do something like that before, and he pulled it off very well.”

Over 15 years, Greene planted more than 12,000 seedlings and plants, and an unknown number of seeds, representing at least 133 species of plants including white ladyslipper, downy phlox, creamy wild indigo, rattlesnake master, showy blazingstar, compass plant, prairie dock and bottle gentian. “He knew all the plants and where they belonged,” says Leach’s predecessor, ecologist Virginia Kline. “He knew what plants went together.”

Greene, says Kline, spent a lot of time thinking about the moisture and soil gradients of his prairie. The soil composition ranges from sand to loam and even clay; the moisture gradient from wet to very dry. By finding the boundaries, Greene could optimize the success of many species, including the rare prairie orchids that thrive there, and that are sometimes stolen by garden enthusiasts.

Writes Blewett in his thesis: “It is evident from the Greene Prairie today that Henry Greene was very meticulous in the placement of each species in the prairie so that it would have the proper set of environmental conditions for survival. True to his original word he carefully planted the entire prairie without the elements of haphazardness and unskilled labor that were part of the Curtis Prairie development.”

Leach imagines that Greene compared his work with that of the Arboretum’s larger, more famous Curtis Prairie. In contrast to the lonely Henry Greene staking out his grids and hauling water for newly planted seedlings, Curtis Prairie was alive with a small army of men employed by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Restoration techniques were less rigid, and the planting record far less detailed and precise than Greene’s.

Over time, Green’s efforts slowly tapered off. His reports, still highly detailed, became less frequent, and he spent less time tending to what for him had once been a consuming project. In perhaps the final irony of Henry Greene’s life, he never lived to see his prairie assume his name. In 1967, not long before the dedication ceremony to rename the prairie in his honor, Greene, an uncertain driver who sometimes pulled off the road to let oncoming cars pass, made what must have been a torturous drive to Arizona, where he committed suicide.