A Story of Reconstruction: A Before and After Woods

For at least a century before development, the land where my western Johnson County neighborhood now stands – which should never have been plowed – was in corn and pasture. In 1968, with a subdivision planned, the developer seeded the whole farm with a dense pasture mix and finally brought the erosion under control. By 1976, neighbors Mark and Pam had moved into their new house on a hill, while I was still working on ours. Photo #1 shows their house looking rather lonely and windswept, and over the next decade they landscaped with trees and shrubs in close to the house.

But in the spring of 1987 they went all out and planted at least a thousand bare root trees (my wife Barb remembers three thousand) covering the whole north-facing hillside. During that summer Mark hauled endless buckets of water, in the hot sun, to keep them alive. Mark and Pam’s timing proved excellent, because although in 1988 a two-year drought arrived, with more buckets of water hauled, the tree survival rate was good.

In the years that followed, competition between the trees and weeds gradually change to tree-to-tree competition as the weeds were shaded out. The climate here on the edge of the prairie is hard on conifers, and over time oaks, walnuts, and ashes have out competed the pines as hardwood tree canopies have developed. Today the house on the same hillside has vanished from my view (photo #2). The pines sill hold their own on the upper slope where they are only competing with each other, but they have disappeared on the lower slope.

Pam and Mark have since passed away, but with small controlled fires in non-pine areas, the new owners continue to participate in habitat reconstruction as their landscape evolves back toward the original “oak-hickory” forest type – which the remnant soils say was originally there. It won’t become identical to the original in our lifetime, but as with prairie and wetland reconstructions, it is possible to recover many of an area’s past functions, including erosion control, soil formation, and habitat.

Thank you Mark and Pam for making our neighborhood a better place!