Prairie atlas expands botanical horizons

Once upon a time there was the prairie. Lots of it.

In southern Wisconsin, prairie and oak savanna stretched for hundreds of miles in any direction. Plants like sky-blue aster, wild Timothy, big bluestem, June grass and bottlebrush – to name just a few – were among the hundreds of native plant and grass species that were once widespread in the state.

Today, many of those plants exist in just a few lonely outposts, crowded into old unmowed cemeteries, railroad right-of-ways and onto rocky hillsides untouched by plow, cow and mall. But a new publication, “The Atlas of the Wisconsin Prairie and Savanna Flora,” promises to expand our botanical horizons by cataloging, describing and mapping the distribution of Wisconsin’s prairie and savanna plants.

Published by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and authored by Theodore S. Cochrane, a curator at UW–Madison’s Herbarium, and Hugh H. Iltis, former director of the Herbarium and an emeritus professor of botany, the new atlas provides a trove of knowledge on Wisconsin’s all-but-vanished prairie heritage.

The informational heart of the atlas is based on actual specimens collected by botanists and housed in a score of Wisconsin herbaria.

“It’s an important work from a conservation standpoint,” says Paul Berry, a professor of botany and director of the Herbarium, which also serves as the Wisconsin State Herbarium.

The new 226-page atlas, says Berry, gives people the tools to truly understand the prairie, to know it in the historical context of the state, and to be better informed practitioners of prairie restoration, an increasingly popular form of gardening and landscaping.

The atlas includes distribution maps, descriptions of plants’ ecology and habitats, and their geographical affinities. Many of the plants in the atlas, can be matched to pictures that can be found in a photo archive at http://www.wisc.edu/herbarium/.

“The Atlas of the Wisconsin Prairie and Savanna Flora” is free and can be obtained as Technical Bulletin No. 191 through the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Bureau of Integrated Science Services Research Center, 1350 Femrite Drive, Madison, WI 53716, or by calling (608) 221-6320.