What a City Girl Learned in Valley’s Prairie

When I found out that we (my APES class) were going to spend the last weeks of AP Environmental Science in Valley High Schools prairie I was not impressed. People assume that because Iowa doesn’t have big cities that it must be full of nature. False, it is full of cornfields. Us kids in West Des Moines don’t live on farms though. We like to consider ourselves “city kids” though really we are “suburban kids”. Nature outside of our backyards is not a part of our daily lives. Mr. Reif decided to try and change this though through population sampling of the Valley Prairie. In order to sample the plants in the prairie we had to get down on our hands and knees and actually look at the plants. Apparently one green leafy thing is different from the next green leafy thing.

So out we went to identify the plants in our randomly thrown hula hoops like wilderness explorers. The first few samples were rough… really rough. Mr. Reif definitely got his exercise in as he ran between groups to essentially identify all of their plants for them. If it wasn’t a Black-Eyed Susan we struggled with identification.  As we worked through our 17 samples we started to get the hang of it though. We recognized the common plants and gave them our own names like “the soft stem one” and “the purple outline one”. The groups started to go through their samples faster and no longer relied on Mr. Reif to identify each and every plant.

As my group gained confidence with the plants in the prairie we also started to notice other little nature details too. We noticed the baby trees that grew in the shade of the mature ones and how different plants liked to live closer to the center or perimeter of the prairie. Though in a few weeks we will have forgotten this knowledge our observations impressed upon us the idea that nature isn’t just one big blob of green. I at least, started to understand why Mr. Reif taught us to care about all parts of the environment not just the cool parts like rainforests and coral reefs. I didn’t learn much about prairie plants but I gained a greater appreciation for conservation and the little ecosystems all around me.

by Abigail Austin
photos by Matt Johnson