Terra Affirma: Lives of Grass

Why you can trust us

By Sarah Gilman

< 1 MIN READ

Sep 4, 2024

An illustrated rendering of grass, with purple blossoms frames an illustration of hills, glaciers, and volcanos. To the right of the image is text reading: A grassland might not look like much—rolling hills that flush green through early summer, then fade to shades of straw and bone. The sort of place that seems more like backdrop than action—an emptiness whose value lies in its potential to be “improved” with plowing and farming and building. Perhaps that’s why temperate grasslands like the vast Zumwalt Prairie, in northeastern Oregon, are among the most endangered landscapes on Earth.

But say you look closer, look again. Say, as botanist Mary O’Brien tells her students, you look at each plant you encounter as a person, with its own drive, its own needs, and its own strategies to fulfill those needs. Say you collect six different grass heads while they’re green, and compare the flowers that form them. They are so small and subtle that to spread their pollen “they must commit to the wind,” O’Brien says. On some grasses, the flowers alternate tightly like the strands of a braid. On some, they drape like loose feathers. On some, they are diffuse as fireworks. It may not be until you know how to tell one grass from another, until you know them by name, that you notice them at all. Then, maybe, you will notice how their variety crowds and clamors to the Zumwalt’s horizons: bluebunch wheatgrass, Idaho fescue, prairie junegrass, one-spike oatgrass, tufted hairgrass, sand dropseed, purple three awn, more.

Their green stems are built from air and light and the leavings of the volcanic eruptions and glaciers that shaped this place. And just as the soil here tells a story of deep time, the grasses tell a story of their soil—how shallow, how rocky, how arid, how wet—the presence of each indicating the nature of what lies below.

A colorful illustration depicts deer, marmots, badgers, and other flora and fauna, with text on the right reading: Many are perennial, and over years, decades, centuries, they send great networks of roots—some surpassing 6 feet long—into this matrix. These join with fungal threads to move nutrients and increase water infiltration below ground. They hold reserves for new shoots after winter and wildfire; they hold dirt against storm and gale and runoff.

Because bunchgrasses grow in clumps, they leave gaps where other plants find purchase. Microorganisms and moss form living soil crusts that join the roots in holding their ground. The presence of Spalding’s catchfly—a rare, predatory wildflower—reveals that much of this prairie escaped the plow. Lupine, arrowleaf balsamroot, endemic mariposa lilies, and other flowers flare into color each spring. Biscuitroots raise their buds like nests of little maroon fists. Yarrow unfurls fragrant, latticed leaves. Nearly a hundred species of native bees bumble amid all these blooms and return to tiny, solitary burrows below the tangle, alongside larger holes where pocket gophers and badgers turn the earth, aerating it and mixing in organic matter, making it richer, bringing seeds up, burying them down.

Above fly red-tailed and ferruginous hawks—part of one of the densest concentrations of breeding raptors on the continent. They grow fat on a diet of mostly ground squirrels, who in turn grow fat on the leaves and flowers and seeds and stems of the flowers and grasses. Elk and deer and bighorn sheep join the grass feast. Beneath and within the sheltering fronds, mice and voles and lizards hide in the shade, while horned larks, sparrows, and other birds build tender, cupped nests.

Look closer; look again. No landscape is barren. All places are made of beings and relationships—known and unknown, named in many languages or in none. Spoken in the clear, slippery notes of a meadowlark song and the smell of rain and dust: life making life making life.

Sarah Gilman is a writer and illustrator covering the environment, natural history, and science. A contributing editor at Hakai and bioGraphic magazines, her work has also appeared in High Country News, The Atlantic, and more.

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Terra Affirma: Lives of Grass

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