Piedmont Prairie

The plants in this community thrive in nutrient-poor sediments, nutrient-rich soils, fire and machine impacted areas, depleted industrial contexts, urban spaces, and hot, dry, and drought-prone contexts. Species from this community are among the most resilient and serve a duty that is far beyond beautification.

About the Piedmont Prairie

This plant community type only exists because of specific human-related disturbance activities. Forest regeneration and fire prevention effectively work to eliminate it. Agriculture also imposes significant restriction, despite the open space it creates. In these cases, and especially in old field pasture settings, remnants of “old prairie” linger in the fence lines and hedgerows. In fact, they reach across the human landscape in a fine network of abandoned and forgotten places, including utility right-of-ways, power lines, alleyways, old road banks, abandoned lots, and along railways.

Mowing is critical now to mimic the pressure that herds of herbivores once imposed, and thus high voltage power line corridors that follow 19th century electric and telegraph paths are hotspots for prairie species. The trampling, seed dispersal, and disturbance of hooved animals, including wallows, is almost entirely missing now. However, at military training bases where ordinance is tested and fires are frequent, unpredictable, and intense, the piedmont prairie thrives.

While only whispers of this plant community lurk in our landscape, it was once a dominant facet of the Piedmont of the southeast, and it existed in every version of succession imaginable. Flora species diversity was high, and perhaps higher than that observed in any other plant community type in the piedmont.

A continuous prairie and savanna stretched from the Virginia piedmont south through Georgia and west into the lower mid-west states, allowing for species movement. This lifeway delivered Andropogon to the east, and undoubtedly bolstered the Asteraceae.

Thanks to the remnants that may be found with a trained eye, much can be learned from this unique community. Its disturbance adaptation makes it particularly suited to the human landscape, and to urban and suburban applications. They thrive in nutrient-poor sediments, nutrient-rich soils, fire and machine impacted areas, depleted industrial contexts, so-called “hell-strips” in urban spaces, and hot, dry, and drought-prone contexts. Species from this community type plucked as groupings are among the most resilient in the landscape industry. Interestingly, many of them remain undiscovered in the trade, despite being beloved by botanists and ecological landscaping professionals.

The inclusion of this plant community type in a variety of landscapes, in an increasing amount, will serve a duty far beyond beautification. Just as the plants evolved over the ages in the disturbance-oriented landscape of the piedmont, thus did the insects tied to them. Indeed, a massive food web that once constituted a majority in our region is now reduced to disheartening levels due to the missing piedmont prairie.

One could list hundreds of animals, both predator and prey, that are struggling due to this phenomenon. Those in the public eye currently are the rusty-patched bumblebee and the monarch butterfly. But the thousands that struggle un-noticed we may never know. Thus the use of ecosystem-modeling reintroduces patches of prairie in this case, and the practice doubles as biodiversity conservation and renewal.

Species richness in the Piedmont Prairie varies wildly depending upon timing of observations relative to disturbance regimes. Those with the most plant community development hold between 65-85 species of flora. Those that are “indicator species”, remaining constant in nearly all occurrences, include little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans), tick-trefoils (Desmodium spp.), bush-clovers (Lespedeza spp.), narrow-leaf mountain-mint (Pycnanthemum tenuifolium), orange coneflower (Rudbeckia fulgida), gray goldenrod (Solidago nemoralis), early goldenrod (Solidago juncea), creeping dewberry (Rubus flagellaris), winged sumac (Rhus copallinum).

The grasses dominate, and therefore should be the primary component of any assemblage marketed as having the benefits of this plant community type. Gardens and landscape installations that pluck all the nectar plants from the prairie assemblage create settings that are too artificial to be beneficial beyond human aesthetics.

Well-intended efforts thus lead to so-called “pollinator death traps”, with unnatural concentrations of nectar-rich and host species that are easy targets for predators, and potent vectors for disease. Therefore, it is paramount that education be delivered with the plants of the prairie if they are to be effectively deployed in the landscape design arena.

Thanks to Devin Floyd of Center for Urban Habitats for assistance with words.