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THE ENVIRONMENT
MONDAY, APRIL 19, 2010
Fairfax County professionals and volunteers from the American Horticultural Society, left, clear a Virginia field with flames. Workers and viewers, right, appraise the meadow after the controlled burn.
PHOTOS BY MEGAN ROSSMAN/THE WASHINGTON POST
This meadow is all fired up and ready to sow
LANDSCAPING WITH BLOWTORCHES
An old technique for growing new wildflowers
by Adrian Higgins
Two-stroke gas falls in little blazing globs from the drip torch of forester Bryant Bays. Moving
through a four-acre wildflower meadow on the banks of the Poto- mac River, he draws a curtain of fire and smoke over the sloping field.
For the meadow’s owner, the American Horticultural Society, the controlled burn is the first for a native plant ecosystem that has been six years in the making at the society’s River Farm off the George Washington Parkway be- tween Alexandria and Mount Vernon. The late-afternoon spectacle earlier this month sounded a pri- mal echo of what was once com- monplace across the continent as
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Once again, fire has become a vital tool in the life of an indig- enous landscape — it kills un- wanted plants and invigorates others. The flames, however, are another reminder that the crea- tion and maintenance of some- thing as supposedly natural and wild as a little prairie requires artful intervention by humans. Once established, the orna- mental meadow becomes a jewel in the intersecting worlds of the gardener and the ecologist. At River Farm, the wildflower field buffers the Potomac against stormwater runoff; eliminates the need for lawn fertilizers, pes- ticides and mowing; and pro- vides a rich world of shelter and food for everything from hover flies to foxes. “It’s created a giant wildlife
habitat,” said David Ellis, the so- ciety’s spokesman. “We have seen the diversity of wildlife increase on the whole property. It has been exponential since the mead- ow was started.” Goldfinches, ea- gles, bobwhites and wild turkeys have been drawn to the meadow and the food chain it supports. Through fire management, In-
dians vastly expanded the range of the prairie, said Neil Diboll, a prairie-restoration expert in Westfield, Wis. Fire prevents sap- lings from growing into shrubs and trees, returns nutrients to the soil, and triggers the germina- tion of many grass and wild- flower seeds. Diboll attributes the decline of
the prairie to the invention of the steel plow in the 1830s, which succeeded the feebler wooden and iron plows and became the tool for converting prairie to farmland. The challenges for the prairie
maker are vastly greater now. A spring burn can achieve what mere mowing cannot, but con- trolled fires are anything but cas- ual affairs. The River Farm burn needed a permit from Fairfax County and the expert guidance of Bay and a colleague at the Vir- ginia Department of Forestry, Jim McGlone. Together, they manage just a handful of burns a year in Northern Virginia. Burning does a better job of killing honeysuckles and other
Tuesday in the Health and Science section: Song
sparrows adjust their pitches when faced with the urban background din of lawnmowers and jet engines. Also, in three new books, Bill McKibben, Heather Rogers and Paul Collier reassess the environmental movement.
nonnative weedy vines than cut- ting. A well-timed burn will kill cool-season exotics such as blue grass, quack grass and fescues, which emerge sooner in the year than the native warm-season grasses and wildflowers found in indigenous prairies, Diboll said. And the black soot from the fire also absorbs the sun’s rays, which helps herbaceous plants grow back after the winter. Diboll measured soil temperatures four days after a fire and found burned areas 18 degrees warmer than nearby soil untouched by the flames. “It changes the bal- ance from cool season to warm season,” he said. “That’s a huge reason why burning is so effec- tive.” Before a meadow reaches burning age, it first must estab- lish itself in ground that has been contaminated by hidden weed seeds. Even the pros are some- times thwarted. At River Farm, the initial attempt at converting a turfed field into a wildflower meadow ended with the mass ap- pearance of pokeweed, a thug- gish plant that quickly overtook and smothered the wildflowers. “That was the ill-fated first at- tempt,” said Ellis, “and it took close to 20 years before we had a better vision of how it could be accomplished.” Diboll says that old fields with
heavy weed growth need one to two years of weed-killing before wildflower seeds can be sown. His prescription: Mow the field in July, and spray the regrowth with an herbicide two months later. The following year, spray the weeds in spring, midsummer and late summer, before seeding the wildflowers and grasses. Avoid widespread cultivation of the soil, which would bring up more weed seeds. The meadow should be burned in the third year, once the wild-
flowers are established. The River Farm meadow was designed and supplied by society board member Kurt Bluemel, a nurseryman in Baldwin, Md., who has spent more than 40 years fostering interest in orna- mental grasses. His weed-beating strategy in- cluded using young plants in co- nelike soil cells, called plugs, in addition to seeds. The gardeners hand-planted 100,000 plugs in the meadow over several phased expansions. Wildflowers domi- nate over grasses, to present a more ornamental effect, and the plant list reads like a paradise not just for nature lovers but also for insects, birds and mammals. The four areas of the meadow, divided by mowed paths, are rich in na- tive grasses and perennials, in- cluding butterlyweeds, asters, yarrows, lupines, black-eyed Su- sans, gayfeathers, mountain mint, blanketflower and par- tridge pea. The meadow, which gets more interesting through the growing season, is open to the public. After planting, the recurrent weeds were hand-pulled by gar- deners who knew the difference between a weed species and keep- er.
“Soil is where the war is won,” said Diboll. Soil seared by flame, that is. For McGlone, a controlled burn is just as much an art form as the resulting meadow. You need fuel in enough dead vegeta- tion, but not too much; you need a breeze in the right direction, but no gusty wind. At River Farm, he had to wait
for a day when the smoke could rise to at least 3,000 feet to mix with the atmosphere, with winds from the southwest between 3 and 7 mph, and relative humidity between 30 to 50 percent. “The art is to start a fire in a way that it will burn, but not so hard that you can’t control it,” he said. The fire was so unusual in
Northern Virginia that power boats raced to view it, a military helicopter swooped overhead to check it out, and the wailing si- rens of the Fairfax County Fire Department grew ever louder as McGlone turned to a society offi- cial. “You did get that permit, right?”
higginsa@washpost.com
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