This Week in Iowa Nature

Banded hairstreak butterflies are seen in open fields and glades near oak woodlands.

Jean C. Prior and James Sandrock, The Iowa Nature Calendar

Rain Garden Interview: Part 1

Tell us what a rain garden is. How did you get the idea to install one at the Kuhl House?

Karen: A rain garden is a landscaped area designed to collect rainwater from rooftops or streets and hold it briefly, allowing it to percolate into the soil rather than immediately flowing out into storm drains. Excess storm water runoff from paved surfaces and even suburban lawns contributes to flooding and pollutes our water supply. So the basic idea of a rain garden is to reduce storm water runoff and keep our water supply cleaner. The rain garden was created by digging a shallow depression in the ground and then filling it with a mixture of compost, sand, and topsoil; this mixture allows the garden to drain quickly. A narrow berm surrounds the garden, creating a bowl-like effect when it rains. Our rain garden is planted with prairie wildflowers and grasses. The deep roots of prairie plants are perfect for rain gardens.

We got the idea of installing a rain garden in typical small-town fashion. Late in 2009, Maeve Clark and Jen Jordan appeared on Dottie Ray’s radio program to talk about ECO Iowa City, an alliance between the Iowa City Public Library and the City of Iowa City Public Works Division to promote recycling and conservation. A week later, Holly was on the show to talk about nature books, and Dottie’s enthusiasm about ECO Iowa City sparked Holly’s interest in making the Kuhl House landscaping more environmentally friendly. Maeve and Jen came over to the Press to talk with us about rain gardens, which led Holly to contact Liz Christiansen at UI’s Office of Sustainability and Scott Gritsch at Facilities Management; Liz then notified Jerry Schnoor, several of whose students in his Sustainable Systems class were interested in designing and building a rain garden on campus, and before we knew it, the garden was taking shape, thanks to everyone’s support.

Why was the Kuhl House appropriate for a rain garden?

Holly: Building a rain garden at the Kuhl House was an ideal undertaking for UI Press, especially given our building’s proximity to three areas that remain devastated by the 2008 floods. Press books such as Connie Mutel’s A Watershed Year: Anatomy of the Iowa Floods of 2008 and Paul Christiansen and Mark Müller’s An Illustrated Guide to Iowa Prairie Plants actively promote conservation and preservation with an emphasis on native plants. We love the fact that the Kuhl House, the oldest house in Iowa City that has been so carefully preserved by the University, now hosts such a progressive project as an urban rain garden. The garden, by the way, is dedicated to prairie ecologist Paul Christiansen.

How hard was it to create the rain garden? Who were your partners?

Karen: It wasn’t hard to create the rain garden because Jeremy Bril and his team did all of the work for us! Jeremy and his classmates Spencer Heaton, Peter Kauss, and Kurt Winnike installed the rain garden as one of their projects for the U of Iowa College of Engineering‘s Sustainable Systems course taught by Jerry Schnoor. We decided where the garden should be located and what kinds of plants to get, but Jeremy’s team did the real work of planning and installing the garden. His team calculated the amount of runoff from the roof and determined how many square feet the garden should be, contacted Amy Bouska to test the soil and advise on the best mixture to promote drainage, arranged the delivery of sand and compost, excavated the garden to its proper depth, and helped plant the seedlings. Aside from the College of Engineering and Jeremy’s team, our partners were the U of Iowa Office of Sustainability (Liz Christiansen and Amy Myers), UI Facilities Management (Bob Brooks), ECO Iowa City (Jen Jordan of the City of Iowa City and Maeve Clark of the Iowa City Public Library) and the Iowa Department of Agriculture (Amy Bouska). 

Karen Copp, associate director, design and production manager, UI Press

Holly Carver, former director, current Bur Oak Books editor, UI Press

Plant of the Week

Tick trefoil
Desmodium illinoense Gray
other common names: beggar’s lice, sticktights, tick clover, Illinois tick trefoil
Desmodium: from Greek, meaning “long branch or chain,” probably from the shape and attachment of the seedpods
Illinoense: meaning “of Illinois”
Legume family: Fabaceae (Leguminosae)

Photograph by Thomas Rosburg, Wildflowers of the Tallgrass Prairie: The Upper Midwest, Second Edition

Interview with Claudia McGehee: Part 3

You’ve been giving so many programs at schools since the publication of A Tallgrass Prairie Alphabet and A Woodland Counting Book and now with Where Do Birds Live? Tell us about these. What other kinds of programs and workshops do you give?

If I had known becoming a picture book author would also require me to be a public speaker, I might have thought twice! Even though most of my speaking presentations are for young audiences, I am still shy about giving them. But over the years, I’ve developed some good and, I hope, thoughtful programs. I use big murals that kids can interact with, as well as a lot of hands-on objects. I don’t use any kind of PowerPoint with kids as I feel they get enough screen time in other parts of their lives. It also keeps me more spontaneous while I present. I like being able to see right into kids’ faces and get their excitement of learning something new about nature. I do have a standard slide or PowerPoint presentation for adults, and it’s nice to share my professional work with people who are interested. I’ve also given a few workshops on scratchboard—the medium I’ve used for years—to people of all ages.

In a previous interview, when we asked about your favorite natural areas in Iowa or the Midwest, you mentioned Hickory Hill Park, Lake Macbride and the raptor center, and Kent and Palisades Kepler parks in and around Iowa City as well as Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge outside of Des Moines. Any new favorites?

My family and I visited Effigy Mounds National Monument in northeastern Iowa this past fall. It was a perfect autumn afternoon. An occasional bird called through the yellowing canopy above and a gentle breeze blew as we made our way up the hiking path to the Great Bear mound. Once atop the ridge, along with the mounds, there is a magnificent view of the Mississippi delta below. The people of Iowa have been enjoying this same breathtaking vision of nature for centuries. How fortunate we are to still have places like these to visit. The sheer holiness of the place really affected me. I can’t wait to go back in the other seasons.

What are you working on now?

I keep several book ideas and proposals going and work on them when I get a break from my commercial illustration.

I’m mentally traveling far and wide with my current project. As a former archaeologist, I am terrifically interested in classic civilizations, especially ancient Egypt. I’ve written a picture book about the daily adventures of an Egyptian pet cat. Ancient Egypt is a long way from our Midwest prairies, but that’s the best part of being a writer/illustrator; all the world is mine, from the seat of my studio table!

—Claudia McGehee, Where Do Birds Live?

Interview with George Olson Part 4

What are your favorite natural areas in Iowa and the Midwest?

In Iowa: Rochester Cemetery Prairie on Interstate 80 just east of Iowa City and Hayden Prairie State Preserve, 240 acres just off Highway 63 in northern Iowa. In Illinois: Johnson Prairie in Woodhull, a small restored prairie established by Kenneth Johnson and myself in 1982—the Johnson Prairie has been a prime source of prairie subjects (and the site of much hard work) since that time; McCune Sand Prairie Reserve, 200 acres near Mineral; Munson Township Cemetery, 5 acres near Cambridge; and the Nachusa Grasslands, 1,000 acres near Dixon. In Wisconsin: the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, 1,260 acres (including a 50-acre prairie restoration) near Madison. In Missouri: Shaw Nature Reserve, part of the Missouri Botanical Garden, 22 miles west of St. Louis.

PLATE 51. QUEEN OF THE PRAIRIE, Filipendula rubra

Source of specimen: Johnson Prairie

Because of its height, queen of the prairie is one of those subjects that demands some adjustments on a 30-inch piece of watercolor paper. This plate shows the top of two stems plus a detail of one leaf. Queen of the prairie well deserves its name because of its commanding height as well as its spectacular pink blossoms. Sylvan Runkel and Dean Roosa wrote that since queen of the prairie was used both for heart trouble and as a love potion, it is difficult for students of the prairie reading historical references to separate the emotional from the physical aspects of these uses.

—George Olson, The Elemental Prairie: Sixty Tallgrass Plants