Your Lawn Could Host An Endangered Ecosystem

By Author: TAHIR LATEEF
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Your lawn could host an endangered ecosystem

In the effort to restore the Palouse Prairie, no project is too small.

Outside Pullman, Washington, just a few miles down the road, stands a little bit of Palouse Prairie on a small hill. Cracked and weathered headstones dating back to the late 1800s studded and undulating wheat fields form the background to this field of over 100 blooming plant species here at Whelan Cemetery. The pink prairie smoke, purple lupine, and yellow arrowleaf balsamroot.

Two hundred years ago, before settlers arrived in the Palouse, these plants were part of what Melodi Wynne, a citizen of the Spokane Tribe, describes as a "million-acre grocery store." The fertile, well-drained soils of the Palouse, which stretches from the forests of northern Idaho south to the Snake River, were carpeted with grasses and wildflowers, many with roots that have long been used for food and medicine by the Nez Perce, Palouse, Coeur d'Alene, Spokane and other Indigenous peoples. Native tribes, therefore, encouraged their growth by setting fires, working the soil, and planting seeds.  

Since the ...
... mid-1800s, however, settlers had forcibly pushed Indigenous peoples onto reservations across the Pacific and Inland Northwest and had plowed under the prairie for cropland. Whitman County, once at the heart of the Palouse Prairie, has in recent years been among the nation's top three wheat-producing counties. Signs along Highway 270, which connects Pullman to its nearby sister city of Moscow, Idaho, boast that fact with pride. By most accounts, less than 1% of the original prairie remains, most of it on land too rocky or steep to farm — or, as at Whelan Cemetery, protected by being home to the graves of the people who plowed it under.  

But the soil remains rich with root matter from the plants that once grew here, and some locals believe that it's possible not only to preserve what is left of the Palouse but to bring it back — one front yard, school parking lot and apartment complex at a time.

TODAY, A PERSON COULD LIVE and die in southeastern Washington without ever knowing it was once a sprawling prairie. "I grew up in Pullman and I never once learned about the prairie ecosystem," said Aspyn Hoppe, a Washington State University student who works on a field crew for the Pullman-based Phoenix Conservancy. The Palouse Prairie is a prime example of a generally overlooked — and globally endangered — habitat. "Grasslands are neglected by conservation often," said Bertie Weddell, a retired member of the university's faculty. "They're just not seen as sexy as forests and mountains."

That’s why Chris Duke, the conservancy’s executive director, likes to say that one of the greatest threats facing the remaining Palouse Prairie is its obscurity. When Duke moved to Pullman to earn a doctorate in biology at Washington State University in 2014, he knew very little about the prairie. He’d spent the previous two years in Venezuela, teaching science at the International School of Monagas in the city of Maturin and focusing on protecting rain forests. When he saw the effects of slash-and-burn agriculture in Venezuela, he marveled at both the extent of the destruction and the fact that magnificent rain forests might one day rise again from the smoking fields. That belief in potential was the inspiration for the Phoenix Conservancy, which he founded in 2016 with fellow grad student Michael Saxton and Ben Stone, an undergraduate in Duke’s ornithology class.

The following spring, a blooming Palouse, full of diversity and beauty, opened his eyes to the potential in his own backyard. Everything clicked: He realized he needed to look down at the world underneath his boots, rather than up at a rainforest canopy. “That shows how little I knew, and how easy it is for anyone to disregard prairies,” he said. 

Obscurity isn’t the only threat, of course: The remaining patches of prairie must compete with invasive species like cheatgrass for space and resources. Invasive species are quick to establish themselves and hard to evict. Once removed, they can be replaced with native plants, but native seeds are often costly; bulk western yarrow or blanketflower can cost $55 per pound, while seeds for the Oregon sunshine plant, known for its yellow flowers, run closer to $300 a pound. And even after native plants are re-established, continued effort is necessary to keep weeds from returning. In the long run, maintenance can be a challenge, said Marty Chaney, a pasture conservationist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service known to her colleagues as “Mother Prairie” and “The Grass Whisperer”: “Funding’s done and everybody walks away, but ecology continues to happen.”

The conservancy focuses on three endangered ecosystems: the Palouse, where Stone grew up; the Great Plains, where Saxton spent time; and the rainforests of Madagascar, where it is politically easier to carry out conservation work than it was in Duke’s former home of Venezuela. Each of these ecosystems is critically endangered and has already lost significant percentages of its original terrain. Today, the Phoenix Conservancy works with groups across the Northern Great Plains to cultivate native seeds, and with a variety of global rainforest groups and Malagasy villages to plant hundreds of “mini-forests,” each about 10 meters (about 33 feet) in diameter, that together would double the size of an existing fragment of rainforest in the southeastern part of the island.

“Grasslands are neglected by conservation often. They’re just not seen as sexy as forests and mountains.” 

In the Palouse, the Phoenix Conservancy plants and maintains native prairies, some of which — the “micro-prairies” — are only three feet in diameter. Landowners pay the conservancy to establish micro-prairies or slightly larger “pocket prairies” on their property, sometimes offsetting the cost by weeding the land themselves, and sometimes by using grants. The organization also weeds, replants and maintains larger habitat remnants like those on Kamiak and Steptoe buttes, about 15 and 30 miles north of Pullman respectively.
Until recently, the conservancy depended mainly on volunteers, using a rented U-Haul to transport their tools. This summer, with the help of private and government grants, it was able to hire four permanent staff, four seasonal staff and four interns and to purchase a white truck, “Betty.” Sometimes the group can not only cover the costs of the pocket prairies but earn a little money for larger projects.

IN A SUBURBAN housing development in Pullman, wheat fields unfurl behind houses, some newly built and others under construction. Many yards are covered with neatly mowed, bright-green grass, but Mike Henniger’s explodes with white western yarrow. When a Phoenix Conservancy crew stopped by to pull weeds and check the progress of the almost 20 species of native plants in Henniger’s yard, small purple blooms of Lewis flax and a few yellow blanketflowers waved in the breeze.

A few years ago, shortly after moving here, Henniger went to a party down the street. Instead of a lawn, his neighbors had invested in a nascent pocket prairie, planted by the conservancy. Henniger was immediately interested. The estimated cost of a pocket prairie, which can range from $800 for a simple design in a small yard to $10,000 for larger-scale commercial projects, was about the same as the sprinkler system he was considering.

Now, a year after the initial weeding and planting, Henniger’s yard is filling in nicely. “It’s great because you really don’t have to water it,” Henniger said, pointing to his flowering front yard. “I’ve grown to love it.” He’s eagerly awaiting the yellow pops of color from the arrowleaf balsamroot, which can take about five years to bloom if planted by seed.

Just down the street at Kamiak Elementary, the Phoenix Conservancy created another pocket prairie at the edge of the school’s parking lot. A grant from the Washington Outdoor Learning Program to the Pullman School District paid for it, and the conservancy will use additional grants to develop lesson plans around it. As of this summer, the conservancy has established about 30 pocket prairies in the Pullman area and is accepting about 16 new contracts each year. 

Altogether, the 30 established pocket prairies provide between 10 and 15 acres of habitat. Such fragments are more vulnerable to invasive plants than a single larger swath would be, owing to their higher ratio of edge to interior space, but quality can matter more than size or location, Duke told me. “Imagine you’re a bumblebee,” he said. “You don’t give a damn. It doesn’t matter if it’s in a school or a roadcut or my front yard.” Pollinators flock to the pocket prairies, which buzz with bees while nearby lawns remain comparatively silent.

Last year, a Phoenix Conservancy client found tiny dollops of white monarch butterfly eggs on showy milkweed, one of the only plants in the region that monarchs will lay eggs on. “Big prairies are very impressive, and they’re important because we’ve got animals that need a certain amount of space,” said Chaney. “But we may carry some species forward in the pocket prairies.”

The conservancy is one of several restoration efforts that are creating a patchwork of prairie across southeastern Washington and northwestern Idaho. The Palouse Land Trust helps landowners implement voluntary conservation agreements, or easements, to restrict future development on their land. Groups such as the Palouse Prairie Foundation, the Palouse-Clearwater Environmental Institute and the Idaho Native Plant Society’s local White Pine chapter are working to restore native vegetation and manage prairie remnants.

The Coeur d’Alene Tribe recently purchased just over 1,100 acres that include what’s thought to be the largest remnant of the prairie in Idaho — 174 acres amid the conifers and agricultural fields around Liberty Butte. “We haven’t had an opportunity to buy a piece like that before, so that was exciting,” said Cameron Heusser, who heads the tribe’s Wildlife Division.

Now, the tribe’s Natural Resources Department is conducting vegetation inventories and creating a management plan. One former wheat field was reseeded with native grasses in October 2023; it will take several years to see results. “Fighting the weeds is the biggest issue and one of the hardest things to figure out,” Heusser said. Since grasslands often hold soil better than agricultural fields, thereby keeping runoff sediment out of waterways, native prairie restoration supports the tribe’s larger stream restoration projects and its ultimate goal of bringing back salmon. 

Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington, about 70 miles north of Pullman, is collaborating with members of the Spokane Indian Tribe to restore almost 130 acres of campus-owned farmland to native prairie habitat. Melodi Wynne, a university alumna and the food sovereignty manager of the Spokane Tribal Network, remembers that when she first visited the restoration site in the spring of 2019, she marched up a muddy hillside to plant to plant bulbs of Lomatium canbyi, an important traditional food that interior Salish-speaking tribes like her own call p̓ux̣ʷp̓ux̣ʷ or white camas.

“Imagine you’re a bumblebee. You don’t give a damn. It doesn’t matter if it’s in a school or a roadcut or my front yard.”

Wynne shares her expertise in food sovereignty and seed collection and works with other Spokane tribal members to plant native seeds in the project’s greenhouse. “That back-and-forth knowledge sharing has been really beneficial,” Wynne said. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when there were too few people on campus to plant the project’s 900 plant starts, Wynne organized an effort to plant them on tribal land.  

While most Palouse restoration projects focus on removing invasives and planting native plants, Wynne includes a third type of plant: “invited” species, which were introduced by humans but can benefit their adopted ecosystems. Wynne cites broadleaf plantain, which she dries for tea, eats in salads, or infuses into oils for wound-care salves.

This fall, the university project participants will expand their efforts from a 13-acre test site to the remaining 107 acres, where they expect to plant grasses and forbs through the fall of 2026. Wynne dreams that someday the restored acreage could join the short list of off-reservation locations where the Spokane Tribe can gather prairie roots for food and medicine; the tribe currently lacks treaty access to foods anywhere on the Palouse Prairie. As far as Wynne knows, colonization has not completely eradicated any food species, but prairie plants have not been abundant enough for daily consumption and are only gathered for ceremony. “That’s something that finds its way into our dreams, that we would have those foods on our plates on a daily basis,” Wynne said.   

Wynne said the restored prairie patch will provide all the students with a place to clear their heads and connect with nature. This could be especially significant to Native students: “If they would allow students … to dig up some of the roots and take some of the plant materials to make foods and medicines, that would really be beneficial for the students,” Wynne said. In her work with the Spokane Tribal Network, she said, “I see that magic happen every day.”

THE PHOENIX CONSERVANCY doesn’t confine its work to small lawns and neighborhoods. When I visited on a blustery day in May, the team was out tackling a dozen or so acres of weeds on a rural property surrounded by farmland. 
On our way to the weeding site, we stopped on the landowner’s windswept ridge, where a silvery blue bend of the Snake River was just visible in the distance. On the plains below us, a creek wound through fields of wheat. After taking in the view, we bounced down the bumpy road from the ridge to our destination, an area the landowner calls Rattlesnake Gulch.

There, we confronted sprawling stands of poison hemlock, taller than some of the crew members. A red-tailed hawk cried overhead as the team circled Shannon Collins, the conservancy’s Palouse Prairie project manager. She called out reminders: Try to pull the weeds out by their roots. Wear gloves to protect your skin from irritation. 

“That’s something that finds its way into our dreams, that we would have those foods on our plates on a daily basis.”

The hemlock plant has a storied history: A poison made from it was allegedly used to kill Socrates in 399 BCE; in the Northwest U.S., where it was introduced as an ornamental landscaping plant over 100 years ago, it chokes out native plants and kills cattle. A member of the carrot family, it has a blotchy purple stem and blooms in clusters of little white flowers. As people started to yank it up, a carrot-y smell filled the air.

Multiple rounds of weed pulling, with applications of herbicide on less-windy days, will prepare the soil for hardy native plants like Jessica’s aster, cow parsnip, goldenrod and fireweed. The conservancy’s native seeds and starts come from commercial suppliers and its own small greenhouse on Washington State University’s campus. Seeds are also gathered from prairie remnants. Eventually, the group would like to establish a seed buyback program for farmers and other landowners, offering them a financial incentive to allow prairie restoration on their land and provide a much-needed additional source of seeds.

Native seeds can lie dormant in soil seed banks for decades or even centuries. Duke pointed out that older roads, those built when prairie plant communities were more prevalent, tend to have native plants growing in the disturbed soil right next to them — a sign of a viable seed bank. Newer roads, meanwhile, tend to be bordered by a wash of invasives.

Unfortunately, invasive plants can establish seed banks, too. Last fall, after the crew pulled weeds and sowed native seeds in Rattlesnake Gulch, the hemlock returned with a vengeance, supported by its massive seed bank.

Staring down at the stubborn infestation, Phoenix Conservancy staffer Cullen Anderson gave himself a pep talk. “If you last in the field, then you have to be an optimist,” he said. “If you’re a pessimist, it will kill you.” As he talked, Anderson, Collins and roughly a dozen field technicians used shovels, weeders and gloved hands to yank out the plants. “I’ve never really gotten my hands dirty,” said Miriam Padilla Castaneda, a student at Washington State University and new field crew member this summer. “But in my first 14-hour shift, I learned more than a full semester.” A few feet away, crew member and University of Idaho student Paige Simons wrestled with plants that loomed over her head, then hoisted the uprooted stems triumphantly in the air.

The conservancy usually turns weeds into biochar, a form of charcoal that’s rich in carbon and can be used as a soil amendment. A new biochar production facility — part of a nearly 3-acre property Duke envisions as a hub for supplies, with a native plant nursery — is in the early stages of construction, with hopes of offering biochar wholesale next spring. But hemlock can’t be burned because it releases a toxic gas, so it will be left to decompose in piles nearby. By the time the crew breaks for lunch, a surprisingly large swath of the drainage, about a quarter of a football field in size, is hemlock-free.

Ideally, the restored prairie would be burned periodically to remove dead plant material and stimulate new growth, as Indigenous peoples have done for millennia. To conduct controlled burns on this property, though, requires trained personnel, firefighting equipment, and landowner permission, not to mention local acceptance of fire and the smoke it generates. For now, fire isn’t part of the restoration efforts; regular weeding is the next best option, though it’s by no means a substitute. 

THE FINAL STOP on my informal prairie restoration tour was Steptoe Butte, which, at about 400 acres, might be the largest remaining remnant of the Palouse Prairie. The giant quartzite thumb sticks out of the plains, a sharp contrast with the rolling wheat and canola fields around it. For the conservancy, this prairie is both a model for its work and a source of seeds for the pocket prairies in Pullman.

Over 200 plant species thrive on this windy outlook. Pink prairie smoke and sticky geranium bloomed around us as a few members of the field crew and I walked up the winding road to the summit, hiking boots and pants still dusty from pulling weeds the day before. Collins, a bee enthusiast, snapped photos of insects. She also pulled the few invasives she saw lurking among the flowers. “That’s the curse of knowing invasives,” she said. “You see them everywhere, and you get sad about it.” 

We spent so much time looking down at the plants that I sometimes forgot about the view. Anderson paused to take in the landscape, which was splotched with shadows from passing clouds. While the flowering forbs around our boots were plentiful, the butte drops steeply into rolling wheat fields, which offer nothing to pollinators. “We’re on an island of habitat,” he said.

“For a bee, the Palouse might as well be open water.” As we walked onward, Collins yelped. A Hunt’s bumblebee, a native species, was buzzing along the side of the road, gathering pollen from the bright fuchsia blooms of a Woods’ rose. This bee and hundreds of other species need prairie habitat to survive and thrive. Today, patch by patch, those who live here are restoring its flowering glory. 

I Tahir have a passion in writing and reading. Usually when an idea flows in my mind I start writing upon that. If I find it fit to be read by others I upload it. I am not writing specifically on any particular subject or topic whenever my mind compels me I write and in the meantime if someone asks me to write on any specific topic I also write accordingly.