00:00One of the best places to experience prairie natives is just 15 miles down the road from
00:07Nathaniel and Deneen's.
00:08Welcome to the Schulenburg Prairie at Morton Arboretum, where botanist Kurt Dreisilker
00:15fights off invasives with fire.
00:18The fire is incredibly important in managing prairie.
00:25So without fire, the woody plants would grow and develop above ground.
00:30And so that would out-compete all these other cool species that can't make it.
00:34They don't get enough light in the forest, right?
00:36Yes, exactly.
00:37If you are managing for prairie, you really need 100% sunlight.
00:42The expansive Schulenburg Prairie at Morton Arboretum stands out as one of the great success
00:47stories of Illinois prairie restoration and conservation.
00:51And Kurt's strategy of cleaning out woody plants and invasives is also used on an island
00:56in the Kankakee River that's home to Illinois' rarest plant.
01:01Okay, so we always encourage people to plant native plants.
01:04And you know, I often say it doesn't matter what you got as long as it's native and it's
01:08providing food for pollinators and with the sh** and the birds.
01:11But there are a couple plants native to the area, some are endemic, that is they only
01:16grow here, that we really encourage people to plant.
01:18And this is a great example.
01:19Right here, this is Langham Island.
01:21I'm surrounded on both sides by the Kankakee River.
01:25This island is the only known habitat, the only known occurrence of Iliamna remota, the
01:29Kankakee Mallow, which is a plant that's great for a garden.
01:33It loves full sun, it grows like hell, and this is the only place in the world that it
01:37grows.
01:38This plant disappeared for a while.
01:40The only living specimens of this plant existed as seeds in the seed bank of the island behind me.
01:46Local volunteers started coming out to the island to clear away invasive buckthorn and
01:50honeysuckle with hand tools and fire.
01:53This brought more sunlight into the understory and spurred a new generation of Iliamna remota
01:58to sprout.
01:59Since the seeds were still laying there in the seed bank beneath the impenetrable thicket
02:03of invasive bullsh**, and thank God for the volunteers, one of them's even got a Kankakee
02:08Mallow bloom tattooed on her arm.
02:11Louie, save me!
02:14Come on, Louie!
02:17Take me to shore!
02:23I'd be surprised if they're blooming, but we're going to just do it.
02:26You need to put this up because the deer would gnaw it down, you know?
02:29Whereas, you know, maybe two, three hundred years ago you had a wolf hanging out on this
02:32island, you know, or a wolf pack keeping them away.
02:35Oh, there's a pink flower.
02:36There you go!
02:37There's a flower, nice!
02:39See that?
02:40Iliamna remota, the Kankakee Mallow.
02:44So most of them are done blooming, but there's a couple stragglers.
02:48This is a great example of how management is important, especially in the age of invasive
02:52species.
02:53The fire is really good for this landscape because it gets rid of things like pigs, but
02:57it also will clear out the way for plants like this to thrive.
03:02This is a fire-adapted plant.
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