Iowa prairie spring bloom
— the week the prairie remembers what it was.
Not only on a wall.
Iowa prairie spring bloom, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“Pasque flower comes up first, pale lavender on last year's stubble. Then prairie smoke in early May, the bent pink seed heads that give it the name. Shooting star follows, then spiderwort and golden alexanders. Less than one tenth of one percent of Iowa's original 30 million acres of tallgrass prairie still exists. Where it does, the spring bloom runs for about three weeks and the bees know exactly where to find it.
The place, in three passes.
Iowa was once 80 percent tallgrass prairie — roughly 30 million acres of big bluestem, indiangrass, and forb-rich communities that ran from the Missouri border to the Minnesota line. Plowing took almost all of it between 1840 and 1900. Today less than 0.1 percent of original Iowa prairie remains, mostly in scattered remnants and a handful of reconstructed sites. The largest reconstruction is Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge in Jasper County, where about 5,500 acres of tallgrass and oak savanna are being rebuilt from the seed bank up.
Spring on a tallgrass remnant runs short and orderly. Pasque flower (Pulsatilla patens) opens in late March on south-facing slopes. Prairie smoke (Geum triflorum) follows in early to mid-May, bending its pink seed plumes into the wind by month's end. Shooting star (Dodecatheon meadia) arrives in the same window on mesic ground. By early June the cool-season forbs are done and the grasses begin their long climb toward the eight-foot canopy of late summer. The whole spring bloom window covers about three weeks.
A remnant prairie has its own quiet. No machinery, often no road. The dominant sound is wind through last year's standing big bluestem and the upslope call of a meadowlark. On a still morning a bumblebee on a shooting star is audible at ten paces. Most Iowans now live more than 50 miles from any prairie of meaningful size, so the silence reads as something nearly extinct on its own terms — the soundscape of a continent that was, before fence row.
