Our chill and desperately dry spring hung tough
well into June.
Happily, native prairie life has about 10,000 years of
learning how to deal with even unusual duress.
We reached extreme levels of drought. Growth was
appropriately sparce. Pollinator populations appeared anything but robust.
Despite knowing full well how resilient this landscape is
and though we'd purposefully nurtured ours to meet the challenge, I worried.
Because that's what humans do.
Then during late June into July, intermittent deluges came.
Occasionally, things took a damned
near biblical turn. Like the eight inches of rain that pummeled the land over the course
of a single day.
That's not optimal. No prairie can suck all that water up so
fast. Most of the precious elixir just washed straight away. All along, we stayed perversely dry.
Then life burst upon the prairie much the same as ever. A day late
maybe…
…but hardly a dollar short.
And suddenly, as if by magic, the summer season turned
typically lush and all the usual suspects settled in to feast.
It ended up being a banner year for local monarchs. As many as seven at a time, some days. Possibly, I've not seen so many in one place for decades.
Not saying the monarch's 'saved' or anything like it, anecdotal evidence too often isn't worth the paper it's no longer printed on. But perhaps the swamp milkweed I introduced last summer had something to do with that.
Who can say for sure, save the monarch?
Come August, the green obscurity of abundance settled in.
Rummaging through the understory, I even found some fungus.
First of the year.
After that, the summer season just seemed to fly.
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