Prairie Studies, J.E. Weaver

 The Nurture Studies reminded me of the story of J.E. Weaver, who I first read about in the excellent book Gardening with Prairie Plants by Sally Wasowski.  Prairie plants are, of course, oh-so-fashionable now in gardening circles, but when they were just part of a place, not of a garden (and the current mistake is to make them more of-a-garden than of-a-place) they were a subject of incredibly focused study by John Earnest Weaver, a member of the University of Nebraska from 1932 to 1952.

Weaver developed a laborious, painstaking technique for exposing and drawing a network of prairie roots in situ--a labor that must have suited his own precise personality for he conducted his field research wearing a three piece suit and a green eyeshade, like some accountant who had lost his way in the country.  He drew the roots in great detail, documenting them at depths of up to fifteen feet from the ground surface.  Later, he paid his students 25 cents an hour to dig the trenches (1500 trenches for one four-year study alone), stretch a grid with string and nails against the freshly exposed root bed, and draw.   Occasionally photograph, but mostly draw, and I particularly love his three-dimensional reconstructions which subterranea are just as beautiful as art as they are as data.

Reportedly, even his wife called him 'Dr. Weaver', and he read nothing but technical literature and never engaged in small talk.  His obsession was prairie plants and their root systems, documented in 12 monographs, 8 books, and some 90+ scholarly articles, some of which are available at the University of Nebraska archives with engaging titles like "The Wonderful Prairie Sod".   His studies were crucial for coming to understand the dust bowl, and why agricultural plants were not as successful as the native prairie in resisting drought and combating erosion.  They record plant distribution and varieties in prairies that have long since vanished.  And gardenhistorygirl advises that they should be read by those who are attempting to recreate a prairie landscape in say, Oxfordshire.  Or on a rooftop in Brussels.  

As for my own prairie I leave a wide band  of the native grasses unmowed, encircling the house like an oval racetrack, the price of which is that switchgrass and bluestem occasionally (okay, every spring, actually) seed into my flower and vegetable beds.  I now understand why it is so difficult to weed out. 

Nurture Studies, Diana Scherer

Photographer Diana Scherer grows her subject flowers from seed over a six-month period, confining their roots in a vase.  When it is removed the exposed roots retain the shape of their now absent container, to be preserved in a single photograph.  Scherer is inspired by 17th century botanical encyclopedias, which often showed roots as well as flowers, but these are far from the idealized specimens found in those illustrations.  The flowers are common, the stems bent, the leaves browning, and the blooms imperfect; capturing the mortality of a real garden.