By Betty Culpepper

Transcript Outdoor Writer

Until recently anthropologist believed that in pre-Columbus times agriculture in North America was practiced only among the native dwellers of the southwest and eastern tribes who cultivated beans, squash and corn. Other tribes they believed neither sowed nor harvested domesticated plants. It was believed that they lived by hunting game and gathering nuts, grass seeds, berries, fruits, roots, etc., thus leaving the land basically untouched.

Evidence recently has been uncovered that this hunter and gatherer scenario is only partially true. Prior to the late 15th century most Indian tribes didn’t plant fruit trees nor cultivate a vegetable garden, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t tend gardens of sorts or that their efforts didn’t influence the lay of the land. 

According to a fascinating article in a 1996 Discover magazine titled “Keepers of the Oaks,” by Glen Martin, “California is wilder now than it was before Europeans arrived. Where there now are forests, there once were vast acorn orchards free of brambles and undergrowth painstakingly tended by Native Americans.”

The Indians didn’t plow the land or put ax to tree; fire was their tool of choice and acorns their crop. They set fires every few years to rid the forests of shade-tolerant conifers, brambles, etc., so that the oaks would prosper, grass would grow, be easier to harvest and other favored plants would grow. Redbuds that were burned, for instance, sent up many shoots that were valuable in making the baskets necessary cooking, gathering fruits, storage and other everyday uses.

These controlled burnings created space around the oaks so that not only did the oaks become larger and bear more acorns, open spaces were created in which grasses and other plants could flourish creating habitats that provided food and shelter for the deer, rabbits, bears and other creatures early peoples depended upon. Their gardening included pulling cottonwoods and weeds from around their oaks.

According to the article, “Natives may have been setting fires in California for at least 5,000 years — But California’s Indians didn’t begin relying on acorns until at least 1,000 years later.”

The most varied and multitudinous plant and animal populations are found not in the forest, swamplands, or on the prairies. They occur at the edge of a forest; in transitional strips between two eco-systems, i.e., where forest meets prairie, swamp abuts prairie etc.

“Regular burning,” wrote Martin, “produces an explosion in the diversity of species. Controlled burning creates edges in the landscape — places where different communities can take hold.” He further states that “fire became a force as profound as weather in its impact on regional ecology.” Fires keep the forest floors clean, “If fires aren’t regularly introduced, the oaks gradually disappear.”

Today because our houses are scattered helter-skelter over the landscape, fire as a tool for repressing exotic plant invaders like the eastern red cedar, Japanese honeysuckle and others that are smothering our prairies, bogs and woodlands often is not feasible. They smother the native post oaks and blackjacks, plum and persimmon thickets consequently with habitat lose we lose the wildlife — quail, prairie chickens, rabbits and a host of others — that depended upon indigenous flora for shelter and food.

What are the complicated solution/solutions? I have no idea of a final solution. Yet, we must do something to slow the rate of extinction of our precious native plants and animals. It may in the long run be up to each of us as owner, renter or squatter to find individual solutions. It is quite possible even in a small back yard to create more creature-friendly zones. First: do no harm; garden responsibly by the avoidance of harsh chemical fertilizers, weed killers, insecticides, etc. These chemicals eventually sterilize and destroy the fecundity of the soil destroying its structure and fertility.

As dwellers of the city and populated countryside we can create “edges” not by using fire, but we can husband our land in such a way that we create wildlife friendly “edges” in our landscape — places where different communities of plants attract a variety of nature’s small creatures: butterflies, moths, birds, bees and other wild creatures.

How does one begin? When possible choose drought- and heat-tolerant native trees, shrubs and vines — or those from a similar climate to ours — grouped together or in combinations surrounded by open areas of lower-growing grasses, flowers and groundcovers to mimic plant communities growing in the wild.

Above all, provide a year-round water source for small thirsty visitors, even if it’s only a dish of water sitting on the ground.

I chose the setting for the picture accompanying this article because it beautifully illustrates what I mean by creating “edges” where one eco-system abuts others. My good friends, Martha and J.R., who live southwest of Norman, kindly allowed me to use their beautiful landscaping and the surrounding wild places to illustrate what I mean.

Because of fire hazards from the tall grasses that surround the property, a wide expanse of Bermuda grass lawn surrounding the house acts as a firebreak for possible wild fires.