Paperwork: How could a weed be a history book? Well, consider this

It’s fitting that Aldo Leopold would mourn the death of the prairie in a graveyard.

I feel I am doing something similar in my front yard. But let me tell his story first.

Every July, Leopold would visit a small country cemetery near his farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin. He stopped to celebrate what he called a “prairie birthday.”

The cemetery had a triangular shape, and protected in a fenced-in pointed corner was a remnant of the native prairie that absorbed the graveyard in the 1840s.

Leopold detailed his visits in his book “A Sand County Almanac,” which was published in 1949.

“Heretofore unreachable by scythe or mower, this yard-square relic of original Wisconsin gives birth, each July, to a man-high stalk of compass plant or cutleaf Silphium, spangled with saucer-sized yellow blooms resembling sunflowers,” he wrote.

“It is the sole remnant of this plant along this highway, and perhaps the sole remnant in the western half of our county,” he added. “What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.”

Leopold noted when the Silphium bloomed each year, until the year he saw the fence was gone and a road crew had cut the prairie plant.

“It is easy now to predict the future; for a few years my Silphium will try in vain to rise above the mowing machine, and then it will die,” he wrote. “With it will die the prairie epoch.

“The Highway Department says that 100,000 cars pass yearly over this route during the three summer months when the Silphium is in bloom. In them must ride at least 100,000 people who have ‘taken’ what is called history, and perhaps 25,000 who have ‘taken’ what is called botany. Yet I doubt whether a dozen have seen the Silphium, and of these, hardly one will notice its demise.

“If I were to tell a preacher of the adjoining church that the road crew has been burning history books in his cemetery, under the guise of mowing weeds, he would be amazed and uncomprehending. How could a weed be a book? This is one little episode in the funeral of the native flora, which in turn is one episode in the funeral of the floras of the world.”

Leopold’s book is an eloquent reminder of the importance of conservation and concern for our environment. It’s no surprise he saw more than a “weed” and was saddened by its loss.

I understand his grief every time I pass over my asphalt-covered driveway that is shaded by a magnificent oak tree. An oak tree that is turning into a skeleton.

This tree was here long before humans scraped away the earth for homes and roads and trenched for septic and water. For so long, this oak has endured all forms of storm. Now, after every brisk wind, I pick up the brittle bones that drop. I look up to see bare branches stretching in all directions. They are like dead veins against the sky, waiting for the axe.

Then I study the few branches that still push out green toward the life-saving sun. Around its huge trunk are clusters of green sprouts of hope.

“This tree is not giving up, so neither will I,” I tell myself. Still, I know what must be done. First, trim the dead branches. Then eventually ... cut it down. Nature has its own life cycle. And … I’ve said this before … everything has a clock.

Still, a part of me hears a voice, a whisper in the wind coming off that prairie. The prairie that Leopold mourns since it became civilized. I hear the whisper now, even though it’s not time yet.

No doubt it will get louder, reminding me, telling me: “That tree is not yours to cut.”

• Lonny Cain, retired managing editor of The Times in Ottawa, also was a reporter for The Herald-News in Joliet in the 1970s. His PaperWork email is lonnyjcain@gmail.com. Or mail the NewsTribune, 426 Second St., La Salle IL 61301.