A trip to the Texas Hill Country, the LBJ Presidential Library, Austin’s Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and an election brought me home to an unexpectedly changing landscape here in the Berkshires, where more than a thousand acres of woodland hills were devasted by a wildfire. The more I thought about these seemingly unrelated things, the more they felt connected, as they all involved the idea of succession, and the fears and hopes it inspires. The Wildflower Center, created by the former First Lady, is centered around the glory of our native landscape, and reflects Lady Bird’s foresight in preserving and seeing the beauty of native plants.
Inspired by Texas bluebonnets, Indian paintbrush, and an array of sages that do well in the arid Hill Country, Lady Bird worked to restore landscapes alongside highways across the nation, and her legacy has only been burnished by the passing years, as gardeners embrace the beauty and ecological value of these plants. But as we toured the center and visited some of the ecologically planted areas of the property (and coveted a few nonhardy plants for containers back home), I saw something else—many of these prairie landscapes were dependent on destruction and wildfire in order to maintain the ecosystem that they inhabited. Throughout the property, signs stated when a landscape might be burned (or mown) and how that impacted what came up in the years to come.
There was a starkness and a beauty to these fields, even late in the seas.
